CHAPTER V

JAMES V: THE LAST OF THE HEROIC AGE

The course of Scottish history during the fifteenth and beginning of the

sixteenth century is like that of a ship on a long voyage, full of

vicissitudes and adventures. The little barque amid all the wild

commotions of the sea, sometimes driven before the wind, sometimes

stripped of every rag of canvas, sometimes beating helpless in the

trough of the waves, rights herself when the storm is over, repairs her

masts, re-strings her cordage, puts forth again sail after sail; and

with a sure hand at the helm and a moderate breeze in her canvas, rises

white and strong against the blueness of sea and sky, triumphant over

all the assaults of external nature, animated by human will and courage,

the most indomitable of all created things, and affording perhaps the

best example of the survival and unconquerable power of these masters of

the world: till again there arises in the heavens another hurricane,

furious, ungovernable, rousing the sea to madness, striking once more

the canvas from the yards, the masts from the deck, and leaving a mere

hulk at the mercy of the waves which rush on her and over her with the

wild rage of beasts of prey. Again and again these storms overtook the

vessel of the State in Scotland, returning after every period of calm,

after every recovery of authority, as wild, as tumultuous, as

destructive as ever. Again and again they were overcome, the power of

resistance restored, the equilibrium regained, only to fall once more

into the raging of the elements. Each successive king, with perhaps one

exception, had seized the helm as soon as his hand was fit for the

strain, or even before it was strong enough for that office, and had

gallantly brought the ship round and re-established the reign of a

rational will and a certain unity of command over all the forces of the

storms; but when he fell, left the helpless vessel again to be balloted

about by all the winds of Fate.

[Illustration: SALISBURY CRAGS]

This was the case almost more wildly than ever when the fourth James

Stewart died at Flodden. The heir, the helpless infant prince, was not

two years old, and the flower of Scotland had been slain with their

king. The mature warriors and statesmen, the wise counsellors, the men

to whom the country might have looked in such an interregnum, were all

gone. There remained only Churchmen and boys in the devastated country,

a passionate English queen of Tudor blood, and no settled centre of

government or reorganised power. Such lords as were left assembled

hastily for that pathetic oft-repeated ceremony, the crowning of the

child, taken out of his cradle to have the fatal circlet put upon his

head--and committed some sort of regency, such as it was, to the Queen.

And after a moment in which the country was paralysed with woe and every

house full of mourning, Scotland plunged once more into the angry waves,

among the lions of ever-recurring anarchy and strife.

Nothing in all this turbulent and terrible history has ever been so

tragic as Flodden. The nation which had lost the very flower and

strength of its fighting men, its defenders and champions, the families

which had lost their chiefs, their breadwinners--often father and son

together, the master and his heir--were struck dumb with dismay and

anguish. It was only a long time after, when despair had sunk into a

softened recollection, that it was possible even to breathe forth that

wail over the Flowers of the Forest which all Scotland knows. In the

first shock of such an appalling event there is no place for elegy.

There was a broken cry of anguish throughout the country, echoed from

castle and cottage, where the poor women clung together, mistress and

maid equal in the flood of common loss: and there was at the same time a

strained and terrible rallying of all the poor defenders left, the old

men and rusty arms, those of every house upon the Border and every town

upon the road who had been left behind, to meet as well as they could

the no doubt inevitable march of the conquering English army, which

everybody felt sure must follow. When the news reached Edinburgh the

magistrates of the town put forth a proclamation calling upon the

inhabitants to prepare for the defence of the capital, and forbidding

the women--a most significant and heartrending order, perhaps unique in

public documents--to spread dismay through the streets by their crying

and lamentations. The condition into which the community must have

fallen when this became a public danger it is unnecessary to remark

upon. The wail that sounded through all the country must have risen to a

passionate pitch in those crowded streets, where the gates were closed

and all the defences set, and nothing looked for but the approach of the

victorious English with swords still dripping with Scottish blood. While

Edinburgh waited breathless for this possible attack an extension of the

existing wall was begun to defend the southern suburb, then semi-rural,

containing the country-houses of the wealthy burghers and lawyers, the

great convent of the Greyfriars, that of St. Mary in the Field, and many

other monastic houses. This additional wall greatly increased the

breadth of the _enceinte_, which now included a considerable space of

embowered and luxuriant fields on the south side. It was called the

Flodden Wall, and kept the memory of that great catastrophe and disaster

before the minds of the citizens for many a day.

But for some reason or other the English army which had cut Scotland to

pieces at Flodden went no farther. The victory was no doubt a very

costly one, and perhaps Henry VIII did not wish to drive the kingdom of

which his sister would now be Regent to extremity, or do anything more

to increase the desperate hostility of a country which was capable of

giving him so much trouble. At all events Surrey's army was disbanded,

and Scotland was left to resume her struggle within herself: which

proved the wildest and most miserable turmoil and anarchy which her

troubled records had yet known.

It would be at once hopeless and unnecessary to enter into any sketch of

the endless tumults of this time of distress. There was a momentary lull

in which, though all the old personal feuds arose again, the poor little

King and his mother were left undisturbed--she in possession of a

regency more or less nominal, and in a state of health which must have

subdued her activities, for her second son was not born till several

months after her husband's death. But this child was only a few months

old when Margaret, young, beautiful, impassioned, and impetuous,

compromised her position by a sudden marriage with the young Earl of

Angus--still almost a boy, and with nothing but his good looks to

recommend him--an event which at once aroused all sleeping enmities and

precipitated the usual struggle for the possession of the infant king. I

will attempt nothing but an indication of one or two scenes in Edinburgh

which took place during this struggle. Undeterred by the evil

associations which surrounded that name, the Scottish lords bethought

themselves of the French Duke of Albany, the nearest member of the royal

family, the son of that duke who had been the terror of James III, who

had conspired with England, and who finally had established himself in

France and died there. His son was a French subject, the son of a French

mother, inheriting through her great estates in France and a position

which was little inferior in dignity, and much superior in comfort, to

that of the harassed monarch of a most turbulent kingdom. But he was

James Stewart, the nearest in blood to the crown, and his name seems,

temporarily at least, to have united all parties, even the Queen, though

his presence was fatal to her claims of regency, receiving him with

courtesy and an apparent welcome. He had not been many months, however,

in Scotland before, with the sanction of his council, he claimed from

Margaret the possession of the King and his brother--sending four peers,

appointed guardians, to the castle, to receive the children. It was in

July 1515, two years after Flodden, when no doubt Edinburgh had regained

that common cheerfulness and bustle of a great town which is so little

interrupted even by the gravest public events. The deputation with their

attendants proceeded from the Canongate, where they had been sitting in

assembly, through the Netherbow Port and the bustling crowded High

Street, to the castle, no doubt gathering with them on their way all the

eager crowd which could free itself from shop or booth, all the

passers-by in the streets, a continually-increasing throng. Who the four

lords were we are not told. The whole incident is recorded in a letter

of Lord Dacre to the English Council. No doubt he had his information

either from the Queen herself or from members of her household. Of the

four men chosen by Albany the Queen was at liberty to reject one, and no

doubt they were men of weight and gravity, probably not unworthy of the

trust.

It is not difficult to realise the flying rumour which would go like the

wind before them announcing their errand, and how windows and doorways

and stairheads would fill with eager spectators, and all the moving

population would press up the hill after them to see what was to be

seen. The high houses full on every story of eager heads thrust forth,

relieving with unintentional yet lively decoration the many-windowed

fronts, the shopkeepers crowding at their doors or seizing cap and

halberd to follow, the hum and excitement of the roused town, surround

the envoys like the background of a picture. Most probably they went on

foot, the distance being so short, preceded by a glittering herald and

pursuivant--perhaps David Lindsay, who can tell? still too young to wear

the Lion of Scotland on his tabard, but keen and curious to see this

scene--he who had seen the envoy of heaven in Linlithgow Church and so

many other wonderful things. The crowd surged upwards, keeping a

respectful space in the midst for the lords with their train, and filled

with colour and movement and the murmuring of numbers that great square

before the castle gates which had held the same excited throng so often.

And before the heralds could summon the wardens or demand entrance in

the name of the Regent, the great gates rolled back, and all who were

near enough to see gazed in amazement at such a group in the gateway as

must have filled many eyes with tears, and which gave at once the most

astonishing climax to that wonderful picture. There Margaret stood, a

young woman of twenty-five, not a noble type of beauty, perhaps, but

with the fresh and florid Tudor good looks, and no doubt the imperious

Tudor port imposing to the crowd, with her child in his little cloak and

plumed bonnet, four years old, holding her hand. Among her little troop

of attendants, the ladies of her subdued Court, and the cluster of

cavaliers who surrounded her young husband, there might well be another

name of gentler fame--the then Provost of St. Giles, Gawin Douglas, poet

and statesman, who was her counsellor and the negotiator of her many

troubled affairs. But in this emergency it was the Queen herself who

bade the startled lords stand and deliver their message. They stepped

forward in some confusion, one would guess, not having calculated upon

this sudden encounter with such an unexpected champion, difficult to

silence--not only a queen with all the prestige both real and

sentimental which surrounds such a position, but also a mother whose

children were threatened. When they had finished their explanation, the

crowd looking on, no doubt impatient of the pause and of the voices that

could not reach their ears, Margaret stepped back and bade her

attendants quickly to let down the portcullis. They must have been

stationed ready with the intention, and no doubt the lords had no

attendants with them who could have hindered any such step or forced an

entrance. While the people looked on wondering, the iron bars came

crashing down, and in a moment the Queen and her child were safe though

visible within. Then Margaret addressed through that iron trellis the

astonished deputation. She told them that she was the guardian of the

castle, enfeoffed in it by her royal husband, and not minded to yield it

to any man, but that she respected the Parliament and country, and would

take six days to consider the demand made to her. The lords left outside

had no alternative but to turn and go back, not we may be sure without a

chorus of commentaries from the lively crowd, ever quick to note the

discomfiture of its masters, and delighted with such a novel sensation:

though the grave burghers would shake their heads at the boldness of the

Englishwoman who had so confronted the Scots lords in their own city.

The Queen transferred herself and her children to Stirling before the

six days had expired, but, as might be supposed, her little triumph was

short-lived. Her boyish husband had already shown signs of deserting

her, and probably enough her fancy for him was as short-lived as those

other ephemeral and still more tragical passions which her brother had

scarcely yet begun to indulge. The excuse which the Regent and his

council put forth for taking the infant King from his mother was partly

her second marriage, and partly a supposed plan for carrying off the two

children to England, which did actually exist, King Henry being, as a

matter of fact, their nearest of kin and most powerful possible

guardian, though one who would have been vehemently rejected by all

Scotland: while on the other hand the little James was as yet the most

likely heir to the English crown. But this scheme had been opposed both

by the Queen herself--whose statement that had she been a woman of

humble condition she might have taken her children in her arms and gone

unknown to her brother, but that, being a queen, she could not move

anywhere without observation, is full of homely and natural dignity--and

by Gawin Douglas, who repeats the same objection. Margaret, however, did

not long continue to identify herself with the Douglases. The conduct of

Angus gave her full reason for offence, if, perhaps, she was not

altogether guiltless on her side; and they were in a state of absolute

estrangement when the calling of a Parliament early in the year 1520

brought Angus to Edinburgh, where with his party he had been sometimes

master and sometimes proscribed man in the innumerable variations of

politics or rather of personal quarrels and intrigues. Albany had by

this time returned to France without however resigning his regency, and

authority was more or less represented by the Earl of Arran, who was at

the head of the opposite faction. The party of Arran were in possession

of Edinburgh and of the little King, now eight years old, who was in the

castle under charge of the peers who had been appointed his guardians,

when Angus reappeared. Queen Margaret amid all these tumults, finding

little encouragement from her brother, who was much more intent on

securing a party in Scotland than on consulting her wishes, had also

chosen to reside near her boy in the comparative safety of that

stronghold. Accordingly when Earl Angus came to attend the Parliament he

was confronted by his adversaries in possession of the town and of the

castle, with his wife, the most violent adversary of all, in the

fortress shut up from his access or approach. He was accompanied,

Pitscottie tells us, "with all his kin and friends to the number of five

hundred spears, weill accompanied and arrayed." But the city was

hostile, and perhaps something in the sombre air of all about awakened

the suspicions of the Douglases, especially as the gates were hastily

shut behind them and more than usual precautions taken. Awakened thus to

a sense of alarm, the threatened party sent scouts out into the streets

during the night, to find out what mischief was brewing. While the

humbler spies pursued their inquiries by wynd and changehouse, Maister

Gawin Douglas, the bishop, went out to see what he could discover of the

real state of affairs--if it was true that the westland lords had held a

secret meeting and resolved that Angus should not leave Edinburgh now

that he had put himself in their power--and "if he could find any gude

way betwixt the two parties." In pursuance of this anxious quest he went

in search of Archbishop James Beatoun, his brother of St. Andrews, whom

he found in the church of the Black Friars, assisting, it is to be

presumed, at some evening service.

"The said Mr. Gawin desired him to take some pains to labour betwixt

this two parties which was at ane sharp point, and meaning little

less than that the bishop had most part the wyte (blame) thereof.

But the bishop assured him again with ane oath, chopping on his

breast, saying, 'By my conscience, my lord, I know not the matter.'

But when Mr. Gawin heard the bishop's purgation, and chopping on his

breast, and perceived the plates of his jack clattering, he thought

the bishop deceaved him, so Mr. Gawin said to him, 'My lord, your

conscience is not good, for I hear it clattering.'"

[Illustration: REID'S CLOSE, CANONGATE]

After all these advertisements--the bishop's secret coat of mail, the

angry discussion between two Hamiltons in the very presence of Arran the

head of the house, when he was himself willing to grant licence to Angus

"to speak with the Queen's Grace and thereafter depart out of the

town"--and all the lesser evidences of danger and conspiracy, the Earl

and his band prepared themselves for the worst. "This young lord haisted

him to his armour, and caused his friends and servants to do the same,

and went right peartlie to the gate, and stood above the Nether Bow in

arrayed battle." The other party, when they were made aware that the

Douglases were standing on their defence, came rushing together from

kirk and market, hastily assembling without discipline or order, to find

the little mail-clad line arranged in the strongest way against the

background of the houses, where, no doubt, every shopkeeper had rushed

to his bolts and bars, and every door clanged to in view of the sudden

tumult. Sir Walter has given us in _The Abbot_ a glimpse more

picturesque and graphic than any we can attempt, of the sudden scuffle

in the street between two passing groups, the armed attendants more

dangerous and less prudent than their masters, whose strife as to which

was to hold the centre of the street was enough to produce at once an

encounter of arms ending in blood, and death for some of the band. The

struggle known by the name of "Clear the Causeway" was more important,

yet of a similar kind. Angus and his five hundred spears--in reality a

much greater number since each spear was accompanied by certain

men-at-arms--had much the advantage of the other party, hurriedly roused

from their occupations, who had expected to make an easy end of the

Douglases, thus betrayed into a sort of ambush in a hostile city, where

no man would lift a hand to help them. But the tables were completely

turned upon the Hamiltons and their supporters, when rushing "out of

their lodging rudlie to the gait in ane furious rage," the peaceable

driven forward by the taunts of the others, they found Angus and his

spears in full array of battle. "When the Earl of Angus saw them coming,

and perceaved Sir Patrick Hamilton foremost, and with him the Maister of

Montgomerie, and saw them in sic ane furie, he knew well there was

nothing but fighting, and cryed to his men to save Sir Patrick Hamilton

if they might; but he came so far before the rest that he was slain

hastilie, and with him the Maister of Montgomerie, with sundry other

gentlemen, to the number of twelve score and twelve persons." The end of

the fray, which was "foughten very hardilie on both sides ane long

space," was that Arran's men were driven down the side of the hill

through the narrow wynds that led from the High Street towards the wall,

and thence made their way out through some postern, or perhaps at the

gate near the Well-house Tower, where the little well of St. Margaret

now bubbles up unconsidered, and so across the Nor' Loch, by boat or

ford. Bishop Beatoun, he whose conscience clattered beneath his robes,

fled again to the Blackfriars Church, where Mr. Gawin had found him on

the previous evening prepared for mischief, and took refuge there behind

the altar, where he was pursued and "his rockit rivin aff him, and had

been slain," but that Gawin Douglas, following the pursuers, perhaps

with a sarcastic satisfaction in setting forth the virtues of a peaceful

robe over the warlike covering that invited as well as preserved from

danger, interposed, saying, "It was shame to put hand on ane consecreat

bishop." The encounter of these two priests by evening and morning, the

supercilious refusal of the mail-clad bishop to interfere, and pretence

of ignorance--and, as one may imagine, the watch over him from afar of

his brother of Dunkeld with the full intention of peaceful yet effective

reprisals, throw a light of grim humour upon the warlike scene. Maister

Gawin had no mail-coat, and would not fight; but he must have kept an

eye upon his natural foe through the fray, and it would be strange if he

had not some pleasure in perceiving the rochet, which Beatoun must have

donned hastily to save himself, pulled over his head by rude hands in

scorn of the priestly pretence--and some satisfaction in interposing to

preserve the "consecreat bishop," whose behaviour was so little saintly.

"Thereafter the Earl of Angus passed to the castle and spoke with the

Queen at his pleasure," says Pitscottie. It could not be a very gracious

or affectionate interview. For Margaret and her husband had long before

come to a complete breach, and the greatest desire in her mind was to

divorce the young man whom she had married so hastily, who had treated

her, indeed, with little consideration, and whom she had come to hate

with a bitterness only possible to husbands and wives ill paired.

After this the young King passed from hand to hand, from one guardian or

captor to another, according to the custom of his predecessors, with

many troubled vicissitudes in his life: but it is pleasant to believe

that though the story leaves a painful impression as of a distracted

childhood, continually dragged about and harassed between contending

forces, yet that persistent placidity of nature which plants flowers

upon the very edge of the fiercest precipices interposed to secure for

little James as for other children the nursery calm, the infant

happiness which is the right of childhood. No more delightful picture of

tender infancy, the babbling of the first baby words, the sweet exigence

and endless requirements of a child, was ever made than that which Sir

David Lindsay, the future Lyon King, whom Sir Walter Scott in _gaiete de

coeur_ (that he should ever be wrong!) introduces in full panoply of

heraldic splendour before Flodden, but who was but a youth in the new

James's baby days, gives in his "Epistle to the King's Grace,"

dedicatory to one of his poems. We will venture, though with

compunction, once more as we have already done, to modernise the

spelling as far as possible, so as to present no difficulty to the

reader in the understanding of these delightful verses.

"When thou was young I bore thee in mine arme

Full tenderlie till thou began to gang,

And in thy bed oft happit thee full warme;

With lute in hand then sweetly to thee sang.

Sometime in dancing wondrously I flang,

And sometime playing farces on the floor,

And sometime on mine office taking cure.

"And sometime like a fiend transfigurate,

And sometime like the grisly ghost of Gye,

In divers forms oft times disfigurate,

And sometime dissagyist full pleasantly.

So since thy birth I have continually

Been occupied and aye to thy pleasoure,

And sometime Server, Coppon, and Carvoure."

In another poem he adds, upon the same subject, returning to the

pleasant memory, the following happy description:--

"How, as a chapman bears his pack,

I bore thy Grace upon my back,

And sometime stridling on my neck,

Dancing with many a bend and beck.

The first syllables that thou didst moote

Was '_Pa, Da Lyn_' upon the lute.

And aye when thou camest from the school

Then I behoved to play the fool."

"Play, Davy Lindsay:" the touch of nature brings the water to one's

eyes. Davy Lindsay had yet to play many a spring before King James, and

some that were not gay. But the gentle stripling with the infant on his

shoulder, the pertinacity of the little babbling cry, the "homely

springs" played offhand that it was pity to hear, but which the lad

enjoyed almost as much in laughing at their dashing incorrectness as the

baby who knew only that it was a pleasant sound--how bright and vivid is

the picture! Thus while the lords and his mother stormed over him, the

little King, perhaps in those small state-rooms in well-defended

Edinburgh, perhaps in the sunshine at Holyrood with his poet, had

pleasant days.

James was already a growing boy when the last and worst of the tyrannies

which oppressed his youth began. When the disastrous episode of Albany

was well over the Douglases again made one last desperate struggle for

the supreme power. Angus it would seem was not discouraged by the change

in the Queen from love to hate, nor even by the efforts which she had

begun to make to divorce and shake him off, and it is evident that he

must have secured the liking of the little King, to whom in the close

intimacy of the family as his mother's husband he must have been known

from earliest childhood. The Earl was handsome and young, one of the

finest cavaliers of the Court, and probably was kind to the infant who

could not contradict or cross him, and whose favour it was so expedient

to secure. It costs a young man little to make himself adored by a boy

to whom he seems the incarnation of manly strength and splendour. And

there is every appearance that James accepted Angus's rule at first with

pleasure, no doubt looking up to him as a guide in the manly exercises

which could be pursued in his following with more spirit and zeal than

in the Queen's surroundings. The great power of the Douglases, which it

took so much bloodshed to break down, and which James II had spent all

his life in contending with, extinguished in one branch of the family,

seemed now to have developed in another with increased and extended

force. Angus was as great, as potent, as universally feared as the Earls

of Douglas had ever been; and almost as lawless, filling the country

with his exactions and those of his dependants. He had attained this

triumph after many drawbacks and downfalls and against the strongest

opponents, and Scotland was overawed by the terror of that well-known

name. It was scarcely to be supposed, however, that the young King,

precociously aware of all the dangers of his position, could remain

subject willingly as he grew up to the sway of a vassal of the Crown

however great. There must have been private counsellors ever ready to

whisper that Douglas was nothing save by the King's authority, and that

James's favour alone could keep him in his usurped place. A few months

after he had attained the age of sixteen, the boy over whom everybody

had intrigued and plotted all his life long, who had been torn from one

side to another since ever he could remember, and whom a Douglas had but

recently threatened, at a moment of alarm, that rather than render him

up they would tear him in two, took at last the matter into his own

hands. Whether the suggestion was his own, or had in some way been

breathed into his mind, there is no evidence; but it is clear that he

had good reason to be very tired of his subjection. He had already

attempted, we are told, several means of getting free of bondage, but

had only succeeded in causing the destruction of various lords to whom

he had appealed. All his friends had been alienated from him. His mother

was powerless to help, and indeed on her own account in such evil case

that she is said to have wandered over the country in disguise,

friendless and out of favour with all. She had hastened into a third

foolish marriage as soon as she had obtained her divorce from Angus, and

thus lost all her supporters and champions. His uncle, Henry VIII, was

more closely bound to Angus, who was strongly in the interest of England

as against France, than to any other Scot, and the young King was thus

surrounded by influences hostile to his freedom.

[Illustration: DOORWAY, SIR A. AITCHESON'S HOUSE]

There are moments, however, when the most vigilant watch relaxes, and it

so happened that Angus left his young prisoner on one occasion at the

Castle of Falkland, the hunting seat of the Scots kings, to all

appearance fully occupied with hunting and hawking and thinking of

nothing more important, in the charge of Archibald Douglas, the Earl's

uncle, George his brother, and a certain James Douglas of Parkhead, who

was the captain of the guard. When Angus had been gone a day or two, the

elder of these guardians asked leave of the King, according to the

formula, to go to Dundee upon personal business of his own; and George

Douglas rode off to St. Andrews to see the Bishop on a question of

taxes, leaving only the captain and his hundred guardsmen to be

accounted for. Who can doubt that young James was well used to all

devices for deceiving his gaolers, he who had been held by so many?

There was nothing in his present expedient which could have offended the

most tender conscience. He desired that preparations might be made for a

great hunting, calling upon "the laird of Ferme, forester of the park of

Falkland, and chamberlain of Fife," to warn everybody about and call all

the surrounding gentlemen "that had speedie dogs" to hunt with him,

appointing the meeting next morning at seven o'clock, "for he was

determined to slay ane deare or two for his pleasure." Pitscottie is

very particular in his description, and places the economy of the little

castle before us, among its woods--with its simplicity, its precautions,

the homeliness of the household. The King desired to have "his

disjeuner" at four in the morning, and bade James Douglas "gang the

sooner to his bed that night that he might rise the sooner in the

morning," and after he had supped, called for a drink and drank to

Douglas, saying that they should see good hunting on the morn, and

warning him not to be late; from which it may be guessed that Captain

James was not fond of early hours. The captain saw as he thought the

King go to bed, and having set the watch, and arranged everything for

the night, went to bed himself, as the boy had laughingly bidden him to

do. As soon as all was quiet, eluding the watch without apparent

difficulty, the King, attended only by "Jockie Hart, a yeoman of the

stable," and another "secret servant," escaped in the stillness of the

night into the freedom of the sleeping country. It is said by one

authority to have been in June that this evasion was made, but in June

there is scarcely any night at all in Scotland, and the brief darkness

could scarcely have served as a screen for the fugitives; probably it

was earlier in the year, when the night was more to be calculated upon.

One can imagine the breathless excitement and delight of the long ride,

with the fresh breeze in his face, and one of the richest valleys in

Scotland coming softly into sight in the midst of the morning, as the

young King full of spirit, ambition, and all the rising impulses of

manhood, left behind him the gentle shadow of the Lomond hills, and

swept round the base of the Ochils towards the castle, high-standing on

its rock, where freedom and his crown and all the privileges of royal

life and independence were awaiting him. He reached Stirling in the

breaking of the day, and galloping across the bridge, caused its gates

to be closed after him, that no pursuer might cross the river; and was

received with great rejoicing in the castle, where everything had been

prepared for his coming, and where the captain, having let down the

portcullis and made all secure, "laid the King in his bed, because he

had ridden all that night." Probably there was no moment in the life of

the young monarch, who had fallen upon such troubled times, more sweet

than this when, after the wild excitement of the long night's riding, he

closed his young eyes, at an hour so unaccustomed, in the clear radiance

of the morning, feeling his life now free before him, as light and fair

and unfettered as the rising day. But Pitscottie must continue the tale

in his own admirable way. He says:--

"We will lat him sleep in his bed, and return to George Douglas, who

came home to Falkland at eleven hours at night, and required at the

porters what the King was doing, who answered that he was in his own

chamber sleeping, who was to rise tymous to the hunting, and right

so said the watchmen. George hearing this went to his bed, till on

the morn that the sun rose. Then came Patrick Carmichael, baillie of

Abernethie, and knocked at George Douglas's chamber door, and

inquired of him what the King was doing. George answered that he was

not waked as yet in his own chamber. The baillie answered, 'Ye are

deceaved; he is along the bridge of Stirling this night.' Then

George Douglas gat up hastilie and went to the porters and watchmen

and inquired for the King, who still answered that he was sleeping

in his own chamber. Then George Douglas came to the King's chamber

door and found it locked, and dang it up, but found no man in it.

Then he cryed, 'Fye, treason, the King is gone!'"

The confusion and dismay of the household were great. Some said that the

King had gone to Bambriefe "to visit a gentlewoman," which explanation

was received with relief, the question of morality being of small

consequence in comparison. George Douglas immediately leaped on his

horse to ascertain if this were true, but had not ridden more than two

miles when he met the Earl of Rothes, who told him the King was not

there. By this time the other Douglas who had gone to Dundee had

returned also, and a hurried council was held what to do. Angus himself

was immediately summoned from Tantallon by an express, "ane haistie

post," and instantly answering, set out with his uncle and brother, and

rode to Stirling with some forlorn hope it would appear of recovering

their empire over the King. But James had already gathered counsellors

round him, and was himself too strongly determined to maintain his

liberty to allow any approach. The road to Stirling would no doubt be

full of scouts, to give warning of what the discomfited but powerful

family meant to do, and as soon as their approach was known a herald was

sent to the town cross to proclaim by sound of trumpet a royal decree

that neither Angus nor his companions should approach within six miles

of where the King was under pain of death. It is curious to mark how in

a moment the great power of the Douglases and their high courage

collapsed in face of this proclamation. They paused on their hasty ride,

and held another hasty council, and though some among them were for

pressing forward and seizing once more the malapert boy who defied them,

the Earl himself and his brother decided to obey the proclamation and

withdraw. They fell back upon Linlithgow, where they paused a day or two

hoping perhaps for better news. But by this time the other nobles were

crowding round the King. Huntly, Argyle, Athole, Glencairn, Monteith,

and Rothes, with a still larger company of barons, hastened to Stirling

to protect and aid with their counsel the liberated prince. Archbishop

Beatoun, the wily Churchman, who had done all he could to overthrow

Angus,--who had been for a moment so worsted in the conflict that he

skulked about his own Fife moors in the disguise of a shepherd, but who

had lately made friends with the dominant family and entertained the

King and his guardians together, calling them "to his pasche (Easter) at

St. Andrews,"--and who had no doubt known of the momentous night

journey, and probably detained George Douglas late that evening to make

it more sure, had also joined the King.

With this powerful escort James proceeded to Edinburgh, where for some

time the lords around him kept watch night and day, keeping their little

army of attendants under arms in case of any attack on the part of

Angus. One night, we are told, James himself in full armour took the

command of the guard, more probably, however, from a boyish desire to

feel himself at the head of his defenders than for any other reason; and

even his bedchamber was shared, after an unpleasant fashion of the time,

by the bastard of Arran, "James Hamilton, that bloody butcherer," as

Pitscottie calls him, who had precipitated the fray of "Clear the

Causeway" and was Angus's most inveterate enemy. These extraordinary

precautions, however, seem to have been unnecessary. The Douglases would

appear to have accepted their defeat as complete, and to have been

entirely cowed by it. Another proclamation was put forth on the arrival

of the King in Edinburgh commanding all true subjects to refrain from

intercourse of any kind with Angus, his brother, and uncle, not to

receive them or succour them or hold any communication with them on

peril of being considered sharers in their crime--in short, a sort of

interdict after the papal fashion. The impromptu council sat for two

days in the upper chamber of the Tolbooth, which was the recognised

Parliament House, chiefly, it would seem, to hear the King's indictment

against the family of Douglas. James set forth all his grievances, his

subjection to the will of Angus, his separation from his own friends,

the appearance he had been made to assume of enmity to his real

champions, and vowed at the end, says Pitscottie, in the fervour of his

indignation and resentment, that Scotland should not hold them both. He

would receive nothing but support in that assembly where all had

suffered from the supremacy of Angus, and where the too powerful race

had no friends. The council appointed anew all the high officers of

State, whose posts had been appropriated by the Douglases, and sent an

envoy to England to announce that the government of Scotland was

henceforward in the King's own hands. It was also ordained that a

Parliament should be called in the month of September, to confirm in a

more decorous and regular way the decisions of the present hasty

assembly.

When Parliament met these questions were accordingly discussed over

again, with confirmation of what had been already done. It was decided

that Angus should be summoned before them to answer for his misdeeds,

under the penalty if he did not appear of being "put to the horn and

banished during the King's will." Angus was not so rash as to trust

himself within the power of his enemies, as his kinsmen of the house of

Douglas had already done on two fatal occasions: and as neither he nor

his retainers put in an appearance, they were accordingly attainted,

their lands forfeited to the Crown, their name put under the public ban,

their great castle of Tantallon seized, and themselves proclaimed

through all the country as traitors whom no man should receive or

succour.

The complete downfall which overtook this great house after the young

King's abandonment of it is very remarkable, and shows how important was

the royal position, notwithstanding the manner in which it had been

_exploite_, and the mere nominal power of its actual possessor. The

house of Angus crumbled into the dust as soon as their young prisoner

escaped their hands. They took refuge in England, where they vainly

attempted on various occasions to negotiate for their return, but with

no success. The name continued obnoxious to James during his whole life.

Sir Walter has done his best to rehabilitate that name in the noble

Douglas of _The Lady of the Lake_, who has been identified with

Archibald of Kilspindie, "the uncle of the banished Earl," the story of

whose appearance at the games at Stirling is said to have some

foundation of reality. But the historians of the house, who alone

mention this, state the facts in a very different way.

Thus the Angus branch of the Douglas family fell, as the Earls of

Douglas had fallen, and for a generation there was little heard of it

save in mutterings of treason in moments of difficulty, which never came

to much--until in the following reign the indomitable race rose again in

another branch and under another name, and furnished in the Regent

Morton one of the strongest as well as the most questionable figures of

a deeply disturbed time. Never was a race more difficult to subdue.

The escape of James from Falkland took place between Easter and June in

the year 1527. In 1528, the Douglases being clean swept out of the

country, the young King went on a professed hunting expedition to the

Borders, where, besides innumerable deer, its ostensible reason, his

ride through the southern district carried punishment and death to many

a Border reiver and especially to the famous John or Johnnie Armstrong,

the Laird of Kilnokie, and chief or at least best-known representative

of his name. Whether it was wise policy to hang the reiver who was the

terror of the Borders, yet "never molested no Scottis man," it is not

necessary to decide. He was a scourge to the English, of whom it was

said that there was none from the Scottish Border to Newcastle who did

not "pay ane tribute to be free of his cumber." Johnnie Armstrong had

the folly to come into the King's presence with such a train, his men so

completely armed and so many in number, as to compete with royal

magnificence, not very great in Scotland in those days. "What wants yon

knave that a king should have?" said the young James, who had certainly

had enough of such powerful subjects: and he would not listen to either

excuse or explanation from the Borderer, whose defiance as he was led to

his execution, and the wail of his wild followers after him, sounds

still in the stirring strains of song and ballad. No doubt it was

justice that James did--but justice somewhat stern and out of time.

The young Court now blazing out into full splendour, with a legitimate

head and every prospect of prosperity, became again the resort of

foreign chivalry and magnificent envoys, among them a legate from the

Pope to assure the allegiance of James to the Holy See, which his uncle

of England had deserted. Henry at the same time did not neglect by

constant messengers and vague promises, now of the hand of the Princess

Mary, now of an English dukedom, to secure his nephew to his side. After

that princess, whom her father tried his utmost to put out of the

succession by divorcing her mother, James was the next heir, and Henry

did not forget that possibility. The hand of the young princess had

already been several times offered to the Scots King without any

certainty either in the proposal or its acceptance. One cannot help

wondering what might have been the issue had that unhappy Mary, to whom

history has given so grim a nickname, been thus wedded in early youth to

a gracious and gallant Stewart. In all history there occurs by times a

gleam like this of possible deliverance from fate, an opening by which

the subjects of tragedy might have secured an escape had they but known.

One wonders had she thus escaped the wrongs and bitterness of her early

career whether Mary would have got free from those traces of blood and

madness which have left so dark a shadow upon her name; or whether, in

the conflict that was to follow, her fierce Tudor passion would have

embittered every strife. It is wonderful to think that she might have

been the mother of that other Mary so different yet still more sadly

fated, who in that case never could have been the Mary Stewart she was.

We are led to something like a _reductio ad absurdum_ by such

speculations, very vain yet always attractive as they are. James was

eager to marry at the earliest possible moment, and all would have

welcomed the marriage with his kinswoman.

In this respect, however, as in almost every other, Scotland was now at

a turning-point of the utmost importance in her career. For the first

time her politics had begun to be troubled by the possibility of an

alliance with England more strong and lasting than the brief periods of

truce which had hitherto existed between two nations whose principle and

tradition were those of enmity. A perpetual peace had indeed been sworn

and signed at the time of the marriage of Margaret Tudor with James IV,

but how little lasting that had been is amply demonstrated by the fact

that no such crushing defeat had ever been inflicted upon Scotland as

that of Flodden, in which the King and the great part of his nobles

perished. Perhaps it was the germ of the design to attract the lesser

country into the arms of the greater by friendship rather than to set

her desperately at bay against all peaceful influences, which had

prevented the successful army from taking advantage of the victory; but

certainly through all the distracted period of James's minority efforts

had been made by constant envoys to acquire a share in the councils of

the country, such as had hitherto been considered the right of France,

who was the old and faithful ally as England was "the auld enemy" of the

Scots. The alliance with France had been taken for granted on all sides.

That Scotland should harass England in every war between that country

and her continental neighbour was a foregone conclusion, and it was

something still more sure, a proverb on the English side, that when

France was to be assailed the right thing was to begin with Scotland.

The position of Henry as brother of the Scottish Queen, and the nearest

relative of James, who, under circumstances not at all unlikely to

occur, might be his heir, gave the English king now a natural right to

interfere; and it is conceivable that had this right been exercised more

wisely it might have led to fortunate issues. But unhappily King Henry

had associated his influence with that of Angus, taking the part of his

sister's discarded husband with great determination, and apparently

without any sympathy in those changes in Margaret's affections which so

much resembled his own. Angus was to Scotland the representative of the

English alliance, and as everything connected with Angus had now become

hateful to James, it followed that his uncle's desire to obtain an

influence over him, which was not accompanied by any substantial marks

of kindness towards himself, did not meet with much success: though it

might have been otherwise had the vaguely-proposed marriage been carried

out. But one can scarcely be sorry that the noble and graceful James

should have escaped such an alliance.

[Illustration: LINLITHGOW PALACE]

Other and still more serious matters were now, however, surging upwards

in both England and Scotland, which doubled the silent struggle between

the old ally and the new. On the side of France was the old religion,

the Church which at this period was the strongest of the Estates of

Scotland, richer than any of the others, and possessing almost all the

political ability of the time: on the side of England a new, scarcely

recognised, but powerful influence, which was soon to attain almost

complete mastery in Scotland and shatter that Church to pieces. In the

beginning of James's reign this new power was but beginning to swell in

the silent bosom of the country, showing here and there in a trial for

heresy and in the startling fires of execution which cut off the first

martyrs for the reformed faith. But there is no evidence to show that

James, a young man full of affairs much more absorbing than religious

controversy, with more confidence, politically at least, in the Church

than in any other power of his realm, had ever been awakened to the

importance of the struggle. The smoke of those fires which blew over all

Scotland in potent fumes from St. Andrews, on the further side of the

Firth; and from Edinburgh, where on the Castle Hill in the intervals of

the tiltings and tourneys, the Vicar of Dollar for example, of whose

examination we have a most vivid and admirable report, full of

picturesque simplicity, not without humour even in the midst of the

tragedy, was burnt--along with several gentlemen of his county: does not

seem to have reached the young King, absorbed in some project of State,

or busy with new laws and regulations, or inspecting the portraits of

the great ladies among whom he had to choose his bride. There is a

curious story communicated in a letter of one of the English envoys of

the period of his conversation with a Scotch gentleman, in which we find

a description of James listening to a play represented before the Court

at the feast of the Epiphany, 1540, in the Castle of Linlithgow. This

play is believed to have been Sir David Lindsay's _Satire on the Three

Estates_, one of the most effective attacks upon the corruptions of the

Church which had ever been made, and setting forth the exactions of the

priests from the peasantry and the poor at every event of their lives,

as well as the wealth and wickedness of the monastic communities, of

which Scotland was full, and which had long been the recognised object

of popular satire and objurgation. The performance would seem to have

had as great an effect upon the young King as had the play in _Hamlet_

upon the majesty of Denmark. James turned to Beatoun (the Cardinal,

nephew and successor of Archbishop James) the Chancellor in indignant

remonstrance. Were these things so? and if they were, would not the

bishops and other powerful ecclesiastics join to repress them? Let them

do so at once, cried the sovereign: or if not he should send half a

dozen of the proudest of them to King Henry to be dealt with after his

methods. Even Churchmen had occasionally to brook such threats from an

excited prince. Beatoun answered with courtier-like submission that a

word from the King was enough, upon which James, not wont to confine

himself to words, and strong in the success with which he had overcome

one of his Estates, the lords, now so quiet under his hand, replied that

he would not spare many words for such an issue. This characteristic

scene is very interesting. But probably when the memory of what he had

heard faded from the busy King, and the tumult of public events gained

possession again of his ear and mind, he forgot the sudden impression,

or contented himself with the thought that Beatoun and the bishops must

put order in their own affairs. Pitscottie tells us in respect to a

projected visit to England, vaguely thought of and planned several years

before this time, that "the wicked bishops of Scotland would not thole"

a meeting between James and Henry. "For the bishops feared that if the

King had met with King Henry that he would have moved him to casten down

the abbeys, and to have altered the religion as the King of England had

done before. Therefore the bishops bade him to bide at home, and gave

him three thousand pounds of yearly rent out of their benefices." It is

to be feared that history has no evidence of this voluntary munificence,

but James found the ecclesiastical possessions in Scotland very useful

for the purposes of taxation, and in this respect did not permit Beatoun

to have his own way.

When the young King was in his twenty-fourth year he found himself

able--many previous negotiations on the subject having come to

nothing--to pay a visit to the Continent in his own person in order to

secure a wife. It is a greater testimony to the personal power and

vigour of James than any mere details could give that, within eight

years of the time when, a boy of sixteen, he had escaped from the power

of the Douglas, it should be possible for him to leave, after all the

wild anarchy of his minority, a pacificated and orderly kingdom behind

him, in the care of a Council of Regency, while he went forth upon a

mission so important to himself. He had altogether extinguished and

expelled the house of Douglas; he had subdued and repressed other

turbulent lords, and convinced them that his authority was neither to be

neutralised nor made light of; he had settled and calmed the Border by

the most decisive means; and he was now free to show himself in the

society of kings, and win his princess, and see the world. He had been

already the object of many overtures from contemporary Powers. The

Emperor and the Pope had both sent him envoys and conciliated his

friendship; and in the imperial house itself as well as in many others

of the highest rank there had been ladies proposed to share his crown.

The one more immediately in view when he set out on his journey was a

daughter of the Duke of Vendome. The defeat of Charles V before

Marseilles took place almost simultaneously with James's arrival, and

the Scotch chroniclers do not lose the opportunity of asserting that it

was the coming of the King of the Scots with a supposed army of twenty

thousand men to the succour of France which was the reason of the

Emperor's precipitate withdrawal. Pitscottie narrates, with more evident

truthfulness, how the Frenchmen on the Norman coast were alarmed by the

ships, fearing it to be an enemy which hove in sight, "for there were

many strangers in his companie, so that he appeared ane great army." But

the sight of the red lion of Scotland changed their alarms into joy, and

they welcomed the Scots King and party, "at the New Haven beside Diep,"

with much rejoicing. He would seem to have pushed across France to the

Court of Vendome without pausing to pay his respects to the King at

Paris; and we find his movements recorded in a romantic tale, which is

neither contradicted nor supported by other authorities, but likely

enough to a romantic young prince upon a love-quest. According to this

description James did not assume his proper character but appeared only

as one among the many knights, who probably represented themselves, to

make his feint successful, as merely a party of cavaliers seeking

adventure and the exercises of chivalry. He intended thus to see, while

himself unknown, "the gentlewoman who sould have been his spouse,

thinking to spy her pulchritud and behaviour unkenned by her."

"Notwithstanding this fair ladie took suspition that the King of

Scotland should be in the companie, wherefore she passed to her

coffer and took out his picture, which she had gotten out of

Scotland by ane secret moyane, and as soon as she looked to the

picture it made her know the King of Scotland incontinent where he

stood among the rest of his companie, and past peartlie to him, and

took him by the hand, and said, 'Sir, ye stand over far aside;

therefore, if it please your Grace, you may show yourself to my

father or me, and confer and pass the time ane while.'"

Perhaps it was injudicious of the fair ladie to be so "peart." At all

events, after much feasting, "nothing but merriness and banquetting and

great cheer and lovelie communing betwixt the King's grace and the fair

ladies, with great musick and playing on instruments, and all other

kinds of pastime for the fields," as well as "jousting and running of

great horses," the ungrateful James "thought it expedient to speak

nothing of marriage at that time, till he had spoken with the King of

France, considering," adds the chronicler, who perhaps sees an excuse to

be necessary, "he was within his realm he would show him his mind and

have his counsel thereto before he concluded the matter." Pitscottie

thus saves the feelings of the lady of whom other historians say curtly

that she did not please the King. But when the Scottish band reached the

Court, though it was then in mourning for the Dauphin, recently dead,

King James was received with open arms. The King of France, sick and sad

for the loss of his son, was in the country at a hunting seat, and when

James was suddenly introduced at the door of his chamber as "the King of

Scotland, sire, come to comfort you," the arrival evidently made the

best possible impression. The sorrowful father declared, as he embraced

the young stranger, that it was as if another son had been given him

from heaven; and after a little interval the royal party, increased by

James's Scottish train, moved on to another palace. We may be allowed to

imagine that the Queen and her ladies came out to meet them, as the

first sight which James appears to have had of his future bride was

while she was "ryding in ane chariot, because she was sickly, and might

not ryd upon hors." Magdalen, too, saw him as he rode to meet the fair

cavalcade in her father's company, who looked so much happier and

brighter from the encounter with this gallant young prince. The poor

girl was already stricken for death, and had but a few months to live;

but it is very likely that her malady was that fatal but deceitful one

which leaves a more delicate beauty to its victims, and gives feverish

brightness to the eyes and colour to the cheek. A tender creature, full

of poetry and imagination, and most likely all unconscious of the fate

that hung over her, she loved the gallant cavalier from the first moment

of seeing him, and touched the heart of James by that fragile beauty and

by the affection that shone in her soft eyes. It was a marriage that no

one approved, for her days were known to be numbered. But perhaps some

faint hope that happiness, that potent physician, might arrest disease,

as it has been known to do, prevailed both with the anxious father and

the young man beloved, in whom tender pity and gratitude replaced a

warmer sentiment. At all events the marriage took place in Paris, in the

noble church of Notre Dame, in the beginning of the year 1537. The King,

we are told, sent to Scotland to invite a number of other noblemen and

gentlemen to attend his wedding, which was performed with the greatest

pomp and splendour. Not until May did the young couple set out for their

home, and then they were laden with gifts, two ships being presented to

them, a number of splendid horses fully caparisoned, and quantities of

valuable tapestries, cloth of silver and gold, and jewels of every

description. Perhaps the long delay was intended to make the journey

more safe for the poor young Queen. The voyage from Dieppe to Leith

lasted five days, and the bridal party was accompanied by an escort of

"fiftie ships of Scottismen, Frenchmen, and strangers." "When the Queen

was come upon Scottis eard, she bowed her down to the same, and kissed

the mould thereof, and thanked God that her husband and she were come

safe through the seas." There could not be a more tender or attractive

picture. How full of poetry and soft passion must the gentle creature

have been who thus took possession of the land beloved for her young

husband's sake! The Scottish eard indeed was all that she was to have of

that inheritance, for in little more than a month the gentle Magdalen

was dead. She was laid in the chapel of the palace which was to have

been her home, with "ane dolorous lamentation; for triumph and merriness

were all turned into dirges and soul-masses, which were very lamentable

to behold."

This sad story is crowned by Pitscottie with a brief note of the death

of the Duc de Vendome's daughter, "who took sick displeasure at the King

of Scotland's marriage that she deceased immediately thereafter; whereat

the King of Scotland was highly displeased, thinking that he was the

occasion of that gentlewoman's death." Other historians say that this

tragical conclusion did not occur, but that the Princess of Vendome was

married on the same day as James. Pitscottie's is the more romantic

ending, and rounds the pathetic tale.

After such a mournful and ineffectual attempt at married life all the

negotiations had to be begun over again, and James was at last married,

to the general satisfaction, to Mary of Guise, a woman, as it turned

out, of many fine and noble qualities, to which but indifferent justice

was ever done. It was before this event, however, and immediately after

the death of the Queen, that a curious and tragical incident happened,

which furnished another strange scene to the many associations of

Edinburgh. This was the execution of Lady Glamis upon the Castle Hill

for witchcraft and secret attempts upon the life of the King by means of

magic or of poison. No one seems to know what these attempts were.

Pitscottie gives this extraordinary event a short paragraph. The grave

Pinkerton fills a page or two with an apology or defence of James for

permitting such an act. But we are not told what was the evidence, or

how the sovereign's life was threatened. The supposed culprit was

however--and the fact is significant--the only member of the family of

Angus left in Scotland, the sister of the Earl. Once more the Castle

Hill was covered with an awed or excited crowd, not unaccustomed to that

sight, for the heretics had burnt there not long before, but at once

more and less moved than usual, for the victim was a woman fair and

dignified, such a sufferer as always calls forth the pity of the

spectators, but her crime witchcraft, a thing held in universal horror,

and with which there would be no sympathisers. Few, if any, in that

crowd would be so advanced in sentiment as to regard the cruel

exhibition with the horrified contempt of modern times. The throng that

lined that great platform would have no doubt that it was right to burn

a witch wherever she was found; and the beauty of the woman and the

grandeur of her race would give a pang the more of painful satisfaction

in her destruction. But it is strange that thus a last blow should have

been aimed at that family, once so great and strong, which James's

resentment had pursued to the end. A little while before, Archibald

Douglas of Kilspindie had thrown himself upon James's mercy--the only

member of the Douglas family who can be in any way identified with the

noble Douglas of _The Lady of the Lake_.

"'Tis James of Douglas, by St. Serle,

The uncle of the banished Earl."

But Archibald of Kilspindie did not meet the same forgiveness with which

his prototype in the poem was received. He was sent back into banishment

unforgiven, the King's word having been passed to forgive no one

condemned by the law. Perhaps the same stern fidelity to a stern promise

was the reason why Lady Glamis was allowed to go to the stake unrescued.

But we speculate in vain on subjects so veiled in ignorance and

uncertainty. Perhaps his counsellors acted on their own authority in

respect to a crime the reprobation and horror of which were universal,

and did not disturb the King in the first shock of his mourning. In the

same week the fair and fragile Magdalen of France was carried to her

burial, and Lady Glamis was burned at the other extremity of Edinburgh.

Perhaps it was supposed that something in the incantations of the one

had a fatal influence upon the young existence of the other. At all

events these two sensations fell to the populace of Edinburgh and all

the strangers who were constantly passing through her gates, at the same

time. Life in those days was full of pictorial circumstances which do

not belong to ours. One is inclined to wonder sometimes whether the many

additional comforts we possess make up for that perpetual movement in

the air, the excitement, the communication of new ideas, the strange

sights both pleasant and terrible. The burning of a witch or a heretic

is perhaps too tremendous a sensation to be desired by the most heroic

spectator; but the perpetual drama going on thus before the eyes of all

the world, and giving to the poorest an absolute share in every new and

strange thing, must have added a reality to national life which no

newspapers can give. That the people remain always eager for this share

in historical events, the crowds that never weary of gazing at passing

princes, the innumerable audience of the picture papers, the endless

reproduction of every insignificant public event, from a procession of

aldermen to the simplest day's journey of a royal personage, abundantly

testify. In the days of the Jameses few of the crowd could read, and

still fewer had the chance of reading. A ballad flying from voice to

voice across the country, sung at the ingle-neuk, repeated from one to

another in the little crowd at a "stairhead," in which the grossest

humorous view was the best adapted for the people, represented popular

literature. But most things that went on were visible to the crowding

population. They saw the foreign visitors, the ambassadors, the knights,

each with his distinguishable crest, who came to meet in encounter of

arms the knights of the Scottish Court. All that went on they had their

share in, and a kind of acquaintance with every notability. The public

events were a species of large emblazoned history which he who ran could

read.

These ballads above referred to came to singular note, however, in one

of the many discussions between England and Scotland which were carried

on by means of the frequent envoys sent to James from his uncle. The

Borders, it appears, were full of this flying literature sent forth by

unknown writers, and spread probably by, here and there, a wandering

friar, more glad of a merry rhyme than disconcerted by a satire against

his own cloth, or with still more relish dispersing over the countryside

reports of King Henry's amours and divorces, and of the plundering of

abbeys and profane assumption of sacred rights by a monarch who was so

far from sanctified. Popular prophecies of how a new believing king

should be raised up to disconcert the heretics, and on the northern side

of the Border of the speedy elevation of James to the throne of England,

and final victorious triumph of the Scottish side, flew from village to

village, exciting at last the alarm of Henry and his council, who made

formal complaint of them at the Scottish Court, drawing from James a

promise that if any of his subjects should be found to be the authors of

such productions they should suffer death for it--a heavy penalty for

literary transgression. In Scotland farther north it was another kind of

ballad which was said and sung, or whispered under the breath with many

a peal of rude laughter, the Satires of "Davy Lindsay" and many a lesser

poet--ludicrous stories of erring priests and friars, indecent but

humorous, with lamentable tales of dues exacted and widows robbed, and

all the sins of the Church, the proud bishop and his lemans, the

avaricious priest and his exactions, the confessors who bullied a dying

penitent into gifts which injured his family, and all the well-worn

scandals by which in every time of reformation the coarser imagination

of the populace is stirred. If James himself was startled into an angry

demand how such things could be after he had witnessed the performance

of David Lindsay's play, which was trimmed into comparative decency for

courtly ears, it may be supposed what was the effect of that and still

broader assaults, upon the unchastened imagination of the people. The

Reformation progressed by great strides by such rude yet able help as

well as by the purer methods of religion. The priests, however, do not

seem to have made war on the balladmakers, as the great King of England

would have had his nephew do. Buchanan, indeed, whose classic weapons

had been brought into this literary crusade, and who also had his fling

at the Franciscans as well as his coarser and more popular brethren, was

imprisoned for a time, and had to withdraw from his country, but the

poets of the people, far more effective, would seem to have escaped.

All this, however, probably seemed of but little importance to James in

comparison with the greater affairs of the kingdom of which his hands

were full. When the episode of his marriages was over, and still more

important an heir secured, he returned to that imperial track in which

he had acquitted himself so well. All would seem to have been in order

in the centre of the kingdom; the Borders were as quiet as it was

possible for the Borders to be; and only the remote Highlands and

islands remained still insubordinate, in merely nominal subjection to

the laws of the kingdom. James, we are told, had long intended to make

one of the royal raids so familiar to Scottish history among his

doubtful subjects of these parts, and accordingly an expedition was very

carefully prepared, twelve ships equipped both for comfort and for war,

with every device known to the time for provisioning them and keeping

them in full efficiency. We are told that the English authorities

looking on, were exceedingly suspicious of this voyage, not knowing

whither such preparations might tend, while all Scotland watched the

setting out of the expedition almost as much in the dark as to its

motive, and full of wonder as to where the King could be going. Bonfires

were blazing on all the hilltops in rejoicing for the birth of a prince

when James took his way with his fleet down the Firth. Pinkerton, who

ought to have known better, talks of "the acclamations of numerous

spectators on the adjacent hills and shores" as if the great estuary had

been a little river. It might well be that both in Fife and Lothian

there were eager lookers-on, as soon as it was seen that the fleet was

in motion, to see the ships pass: but their acclaims must have been loud

indeed to carry from Leith to Kinghorn. The King sailed early in June

1540 towards the north. Many a yacht and pleasure ship still follows the

same route round the Scottish coast towards the wild attractions of the

islands.

"Merrily, merrily, bounds the bark,

She bounds before the gale,

The mountain breeze from Ben-na-darch

Is joyous in her sail.

With fluttering sound like laughter hoarse

The cords and canvas strain,

The waves divided by her force

In rippling eddies chased her course

As if they laughed again."

But it was on no pleasure voyage that James had set out. He had in his

twelve ships two thousand armed men, led by the most trusted lords of

Scotland, and his mission was to reduce to order the clans who knew so

little what a king's dignity was, or the restraints of law, or the

pursuits of industry. No stand would seem to have been anywhere made

against him. Many of the chiefs of the more turbulent tribes were

brought off to the ships, not so much as prisoners in consequence of

their own misdoings, but as hostages for their clans: and the startled

isles, overawed by the sight of the King and his great ships, and by the

more generous motive of anxiety for their own chieftains in pledge for

them, calmed down out of their wild ways, and ceased from troubling in a

manner unprecedented in their turbulent history.

An incidental consequence of this voyage sounds oddly modern, as if it

might have been a transcript from the most recent records. James

perceived, or more probably had his attention directed to the fact, that

the fishermen of the north were much molested by fishing vessels from

Holland, Flanders, and the Scandinavian coasts, who interfered with

their fishing, sometimes even thrusting them by violence of arms out of

their own waters. The King accordingly detached one or two of his

vessels under the command of Maxwell, his admiral, to inquire into these

high-handed proceedings, with the result that one of the foreign fisher

pirate-ships was seized and brought to Leith to answer for their

misdoings. There they were reprimanded and bound over to better

behaviour, then dismissed without further penalty. How little effectual,

however, this treatment was, is exemplified by the fact that the

selfsame offence continues to be repeated until this very day.

There would seem to have been a little pause of calm and comfort in

James's life after this victorious expedition. Clouds already bigger

than a man's hand were forming on his horizon; the country had begun to

be agitated throughout its depths with the rising forces of the reform,

and the priests who had always surrounded James were hurrying on in the

truculence of terror to sterner and sterner enactments against heretics:

while he, probably even yet but moderately interested, thinking of other

things, and though adding to the new laws which he was persuaded to

originate in this sense, conditions to the effect that corresponding

reforms were to be wrought in the behaviour of the priesthood,--had not

entered at all into the fierce current of theological strife. He

followed the faith in which he had been bred, revolted rather than

attracted by the proceedings and pretensions of his uncle of England,

willing that the bishops, who probably knew best, and who were, as he

complained to the English ambassador, the only men of sense and ability

near him, should have their own way in their own concerns; but for

himself much more intent on the temporal welfare of his kingdom than on

its belief, or the waves of opinion which might blow over it. He had

just been very successful in what no doubt seemed to him an enterprise

much more kingly and important--the subjugation of the islands. He was

happy and prosperous in his private life, his Queen having performed the

high duty expected of her in providing the kingdom with an heir, indeed

with two sons, to make, as appeared, assurance doubly sure; and though

the burning of a heretic was not a pleasant circumstance, Beatoun and

the rest of the brotherhood were too clever and helpful as men of the

world to be easily dispensed with. James had, there can be no doubt,

much reason to be discontented and dissatisfied, as almost all his

predecessors had been, with the nobility of his kingdom. Apart from some

of those young companions-in-arms who were delightful in the camp and

field but useless in the council chamber, his state of mind would seem

to have resembled more the modern mood which is represented by the word

"bored" than any other more dignified expression. The priests might be

fierce (as indeed were the lords, still more) but they were able, and

knew something of the necessities of government. The barons disgusted

him with their petty jealousies, their want of instruction, their

incapacity for any broad or statesmanlike view, and there would seem

little doubt that he dispensed with their services as much as possible,

and turned to those persons who comprehended him with a natural movement

which unfortunately, however, is never fortunate in a king. Something of

the severance between himself and those who were nearest to him in rank,

which had ruined his grandfather, showed itself as he advanced towards

the gravity of manhood: and the fatal name of favourite began to be

attached to one man at least in the Court, who would seem to have

understood better than the others the ways and intentions of James. But

in the meantime the clouds were only gathering; the darkness had not

begun. A year or two before, the King had given to the legal faculty of

Scotland a form and constitution which it has retained to this day. He

had instituted the Court of Session, the "Feifteen," the law lords in

their grave if short-lived dignity. He had begun to build and repair and

decorate at Holyrood and Linlithgow. "He sent to Denmark," says

Pitscottie, "and brought home great horss and meares and put them in

parks that their offspring might be gotten to sustein the warres when

need was. Also he sent and furnished the country with all kinds of

craftsmen such as Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Dutchmen, which ever was the

first of their profession that could be had." He went even so far in his

desire to develop the natural wealth of his kingdom that he brought over

certain German wise men to see if gold could be found in the mines, of

which there has always been a tradition, as probably in most countries.

All these pacific enterprises occupied James's time and helped on the

prosperity of the country. But evil times were close at hand.

One of the first indications that the dreadful round of misfortune was

about to begin was the sudden denunciation of James Hamilton, the

bastard of Arran, as a conspirator against the King, an event which

Pitscottie narrates as happening in the year 1541. He had been a

favourite of the King in his youth, and a great champion against the

Douglas faction, and it was indeed his intemperate and imprudent rage

which determined the fight called Clear the Causeway, and wrought much

harm to his own party. He had been high in favour for a time, probably

on the ground of his enmity to the house of Angus, then had fallen into

discredit, but had lately been employed in certain public offices, and

if we may trust Pitscottie, had been put into some such position by the

priests as that which Saul of Tarsus held in the service of the

persecuting ecclesiastics of Jerusalem. At all events his sudden

accusation as plotting against the King's life, and especially as doing

so in the interests of the Douglases, was evidently as startling and

extraordinary to the great officials to whom the communication was made

as it would be to the reader who has heard of this personage only as the

infuriated opponent of Angus and his party. No credence seems to have

been given to the story at first, though it was told by another

Hamilton, a cousin of the culprit. As this happened, however, in the

King's absence from Edinburgh, the lords thought it a wise precaution to

secure Sir James, and, according to Pitscottie, proceeded in their own

dignified persons--the Lord Treasurer, Secretary, and "Mr. Household,"

preceded by Lyon King-of-Arms--to his lodging in Edinburgh, whence they

conveyed him to the castle. Such arrestations would probably cause but

little excitement, only a momentary rush and gazing of the crowd as the

group with its little band of attendants and defenders passed upward

along the High Street, the herald's tabard alone betraying its

character. Sir James Hamilton, however, was very well known and little

loved, and small would be the sympathy in the looks of the citizens, and

many the stern nods and whispers of satisfaction that vengeance had

seized him at length. The King, like his representatives, was astonished

by the accusation, but when he heard of the terrible "dittay" which had

been brought against Hamilton "he came suddenly out of Falkland, where

His Grace was for the time, and brought the said Sir James out of the

castle to the Tolbooth, and gave him fair assize of the lords and

barons, who convicted him of sundry points of treason; and thereafter he

was headed and quartered, and his lands annexed to the Crown."

It is a curious question, which however none of the historians think of

asking, whether there could be any connection between the scheme, if

any, for which the Lady Glamis suffered, and this wholly unexpected

outbreak of murderous intention on the part of Hamilton. The Hamiltons

and Douglases were sworn enemies, yet greater wonders have been seen

than the union of two feudal foes to compass the destruction of the

enemy of both. Angus and his brothers banished, but little forgetful of

all that had happened, and trusting in the favour of King Henry, were

soon to show themselves at the head of expeditions hostile to Scotland

across the Border. Were these two sudden disclosures of unexpected

treachery the manifestations of a deep-laid plot which might have

further developments--if with the bastard of Arran also perhaps in still

more unlikely quarters? It is but a conjecture, yet it is one that might

seem justified by two isolated events so extraordinary, and by the state

of discouragement and misery into which James seems soon to have fallen.

Pitscottie relates that the King "took ane great suspition of his

nobles, thinking that either one or other of them would deceive him;"

and then there began to appear to him "visions in his bed." He thought

he saw Sir James Hamilton, fierce and vengeful, appearing to him in the

darkness with a drawn sword, with which he cut off the King's right arm.

Next time the cruel spectre appeared it upbraided him with an unjust

sentence and struck off the other arm: "Now therefore thou sall want

both thy armes, and sall remain in sorrow ane while, and then I will

come and stryk thy head from thee," said the angry ghost. Whatever may

be the reader's opinion about the reality of these visions, there can be

little doubt that they show deep depression in the mind of James to whom

they came. He woke out of his sleep in great excitement and terror, and

told his attendants what he had dreamed, who were very "discontent of

his visioun, thinking that they would hear hastily tidings of the same."

"On the morning word came to the King that the prince was very sick

and like to die. When the King heard thereof he hasted to Sanct

Andros, but, or he could come there the prince was depairted,

whereat the King was verrie sad and dolorous. Notwithstanding

immediately thereafter the post came out of Stirling to the King

showing him that his second son, the Duke of Albany, could not live;

and or the King could be in Stirling he was depairted. Whose

departures were both within fortie-eight hours, which caused great

lamentations to be in Scotland and in especial by the Queen, their

mother. But the Queen comforted the King, saying they were young

enough, and God would send them more succession."

There is no suggestion, such as might have been natural enough at that

age, of poison or foul play in the death of the two infants--nothing but

misfortune and fatality and the dark shadows closing over a life

hitherto so bright. James was the last of his name: the childless Albany

in France, whom Scotland did not love, was the only man surviving of his

kindred, and it is not wonderful if the King's heart failed him in such

a catastrophe, or if he thought himself doomed of heaven. When this

great domestic affliction came to him he was on the eve of a breach with

England, brought about not only by the usual mutual aggravations upon

the Border, but by other matters of graver importance. King Henry had

made many efforts to draw the Scottish King to his side. He had

discoursed to him himself by letter, he had sent him not only

ambassadors but preachers, he had done everything that could be done to

detach the young monarch from the band of sovereigns who were against

England, and the allegiance of the Pope. Latterly the correspondence had

become very eager and passionate on Henry's side. He had repeatedly

invited his nephew to visit him, and many negotiations had passed

between them on the subject. The project was so far advanced that Henry

came to York to meet James, and waited there for nearly a week for his

arrival. But there was great reluctance on the Scottish side to risk

their King so far on the other side of the Border. They had suggested

Newcastle as a more safe place of meeting, but this had been rejected on

the part of the English king. Finally, Henry left York in great

resentment, which was aggravated by a defeat upon the Border. Pitscottie

tells us that he sent a herald to James declaring that he considered the

truce between them broken; that "he should take such order with him as

he took with his father before him; for he had yet that same wand to

ding him with that dang his father; that is to say, the Duke of Norfolk

living that strak the field of Flodden, who slew his father with many of

the nobles of Scotland." The King of Scotland thought, the chronicler

adds, that these were "uncouth and sharp words"--an opinion in which the

reader will agree. But whether Pitscottie is verbally correct or not it

is very evident that Henry did not hesitate to rate his nephew in

exceedingly sharp and discourteous terms, as for instance bidding him

not to make a brute of himself by listening to the priests who would

lead any man by the nose who gave them credence. The negotiations

altogether were carried on from the English side in a very arrogant

manner as comported with Henry's character, made all the more

overbearing towards James by their relationship, which gave him a

certain natural title to bully his sister's son.

And everything in Scotland was now tending to the miseries of a divided

council and a nation rent asunder by internal differences. The new

opinions were making further progress day by day, the priests becoming

more fierce in their attempts to crush by violence the force of the

Reformation--attempts which in their very cruelty and ferocity betrayed

a certain growing despair. When Norfolk came to Scotland from Henry--an

ill-omened messenger if what is said above of Henry's threat was

true--the Scottish gentlemen sought him secretly with confessions of

their altered faith; and the ambassador made the startling report to

Henry that James's own mind was in so wavering and uncertain a state

that if the priests did not drive him into war during the current summer

he would confiscate the possessions of the Church before the year was

out. But Norfolk's mission, which was in itself a threat, and the

presence of the Douglases over the Border, who had never ceased to be

upheld by Henry, and whose secret machinations, of which Lady Glamis and

James Hamilton had been victims, were now about to culminate in open

mischief, all contributed to exasperate the mind of James. That he was

not supported as his father had been by the nobility, who alone had the

power of giving effect to his call for a general armament, is evident

from the first. His priestly counsellors could support him by the

imposts which he made freely upon the revenues of the Church, not always

without complaint on their part; but they were of comparatively little

influence in bringing together the hosts who had to do the fighting; and

from the first the nobility,--half of which or more was leavened with

Reformation doctrines and felt that their best support was in

England--while the whole, almost without exception, resented the

prominence of the Church in the national councils, hating and scorning

her interference in secular and especially in warlike matters, as is the

case in every age,--showed itself hostile. After various incursions on

the part of England, made with much bravado and considerable damage, one

of which was headed by Angus and his brother George Douglas (this

latter, however, being promptly punished and defeated on the spot by the

brave Borderers), James made the usual call for a general assembly of

forces on the Boroughmuir: but he had advanced only a little way on his

march to the Borders when he was stopped by the declaration of the lords

that they would only act on the defensive, and would on no account go

out of Scotland. The fathers of these same lords had followed James IV,

though with the strongest disapproval, to the fatal field of Flodden,

their loyalty triumphing over their judgment: but the sons on either

side had no such bond between them. James disbanded in disgust the

reluctant host, which considered less the honour of Scotland than their

own safety; but got together afterwards a smaller army under the

leadership of Lord Maxwell, with which to try over again the old issue.

Pitscottie's account of the discussions and dissensions, and of all the

scorns which subdued James's spirit, is very graphic. Norfolk had led a

great body of men into Scotland, who though not advancing very far had

done great harm burning and ravaging; but, checked by a smaller force,

which held him back without giving battle, had finally retired across

the Border, where James was very anxious to have followed him.

"The King's mind was very ardent on battel on English ground, which

when the lords perceived they passed again to the council, and

concluded that they would not follow the Duke of Norfolk at that

time for the King's pleasure, because they said that it was not

grounded upon no good cause or reasone, and that he was ane better

priests' king nor he was theirs, and used more of priests' counsel

nor theirs. Therefore they had the less will to fight with him, and

said it was more meritoriously done to hang all such as gave counsel

to the King to break his promises to the King of England, whereof

they perceived great inconvenients to befall. When they had thus

concluded, and the King being advertised thereof, the King departed

with his familiar servants to Edinburgh; but the army and council

remained still at Lauder."

It was a fatal spot for such a controversy, the spot where, two

generations before, the favourite friends and counsellors of James III,

whether guilty or not guilty--who can say?--were hanged over the bridge

as an example to all common men who should pretend to serve a king whose

peers and the nobles of his realm were shut out from the first of his

favour. James V had in his train some familiar servants, confidants of

his many public undertakings, who were not of noble blood or, at least,

of distinguished rank, and his angry withdrawal might well be explained

by his determination to save them, if indeed any explanations beyond his

vexed and miserable sense of humiliation and desertion were necessary to

account for it. He left the lords, whom he would seem to have had no

longer either the means or the heart to confront, saying in his rage and

shame that he would "either make them fight or flee, or else Scotland

should not keep him and them both," and returned to Edinburgh sick at

heart to his Queen, who was not in very good health to cheer

him--passing, no doubt, with a deepened sense of humiliation through the

crowds which would throng about for news, and to whom the spectacle of

their King thus returning discomfited was no pleasant sight; if it were

not, perhaps, that many among them had now begun to think all failures

and disappointments were so many proofs of the displeasure of heaven

against one who would not take upon him the office of reformer.

When James heard soon after that his rebellious lords had disbanded

their host, he collected a smaller army to revenge the ravages of

Norfolk, issuing, according to Pitscottie, a proclamation bidding all

who loved him be ready within twenty-four hours "to follow the King

wherever he pleased to pass"; but even this new levy was little

subordinate. After it had penetrated a little way into England a fatal

mistake arose--an idea that Oliver Sinclair, the King's "minion," whom

he had sent to read a manifesto to the army, had been appointed its

general--upon which the new bands, disgusted in their turn, fell into a

forced retreat, and getting involved in the broken ground of Solway Moss

were there pursued and surrounded by the English, miserably defeated and

put to flight. "There was but ane small number slain in the field," says

Pitscottie, "to wit, there was slain on both sides but twenty-four,

whereof was nine Scottishmen and fifteen Englishmen"; a very great

number, however, were taken prisoners, many of the gentlemen, it is

suggested, preferring captivity to the encounter of the King after such

an inexcusable catastrophe. We are not told why it was that James had

not himself taken the command of his army. He does not even seem to have

accompanied it, perhaps fearing that personal opposition which was an

insult to a king in those days.

"When these news came to the King of Scotland where he was for the

time, how his lords were taken and had in England, and his army

defaitt, he grew wondrous dollorous and pensive, seeing no good

success to chance him over his enemies. Then he began to remord his

conscience, and thought his misgovernance towards God had the wyte

therof and was the principal cause of his misfortune; calling to

mind how he had broken his promise to his uncle the King of England,

and had lost the hearts of his nobles throw evil counsel and false

flattery of his bishops, and those private counsellors and his

courtiers, not regarding his wyse lords' counsels."

"He passed to Edinburgh," adds the chronicler, "and there remained eight

days with great dollour and lamentation for the tinsell (loss) of his

lieges and shame to himself." Discouragement beyond the reach of mortal

help or hope seemed to have taken hold of the unfortunate King. He saw

himself alone, no one standing by him, his nobles hostile, his people

indifferent; he had vowed that Scotland should not be broad enough to

hold both them and him, but he had no power to carry out this angry

threat. His life had been threatened in mysterious ways; he had lost his

children, his confidence in himself and his fortunes; last and worst of

all, he was dishonoured in the eyes of the world. His army had refused

to advance, his soldiers to fight. He was the King, but able to give

effect to none of a king's wishes--neither to punish his enemies nor to

carry out his promises. He who had done so much for his realm could do

no more. He who had ridden the Border further and swifter than any

man-at-arms to carry the terror of justice and the sway of law--who had

daunted the dauntless Highlands and held the fiercest chiefs in

check--who had been courted by pope and emperor, and admired and feasted

at the splendid Courts of France--he who had been the King of the

Commons, the idol of the people--was now cast down and miserable, the

most shamed and helpless of kings.

There seems no reason why James should have so entirely lost heart.

There had already been moments in his life when he had suffered sore

discouragement and overthrow, yet never had been overcome. But now it is

clear he felt himself at the end of his resources. How could he ever

hold up his head again? a man who could not keep his own kingdom from

invasion, or avenge himself upon his enemies! After he had lingered a

little in Edinburgh, where the Queen was now near the moment which

should give another heir to Scotland, he left the capital--perhaps to

save her at such a time from the sight and the contagion of his

despair--and crossed the Firth to Falkland, a place so associated with

stirring passages in his career. But there his sickness of heart turned

to illness of body; he became so "vehement sick" that his life was

despaired of; he was "very near strangled to death by extreme

melancholie." One hope remained, that the Queen might restore some

confidence to his failing strength and mind by an heir to the crown,

another James, for whom it might be worth while to live. James sent for

some of his friends, "certain of his lords, both spiritual and

temporal," to help him to bear this time of suspense, and advise him

what might yet be done to set matters right, who surrounded him, as may

be imagined, very anxiously, fearing the issue.

"By this the post came out of Linlithgow showing the King good

tidings that the Queen was delivered. The King inquired whether it

was man or woman. The messenger said it was ane fair dochter. The

King answered and said, 'Farewell! it came with ane lass, and it

will pass with ane lass,' and so commended himself to Almighty God,

and spoke little from thereforth, but turned his back to his lords

and his face to the wall."

Even at this bitter moment, however, the dying Prince was not left alone

with his last disappointment. Cardinal Beatoun, whose influence had been

so inauspicious in his life, pressed forward, "seeing him begin to fail

of his strength and natural speech," and thrust upon him a paper for his

signature, "wherein the Cardinal had writ what he pleased for his own

particular weill," evidently with some directions about the regency,

that ordeal which Scotland, unhappily, had now again to go through. When

James had put his dying hand to this authority, wrested from him in his

last weakness, a faint light of peace seems to have fallen across his

death-bed.

[Illustration: FALKLAND PALACE]

"As I have shown you, he turned him upon his back, and looked and

beheld his lords around about, and gave ane little lauchter, syne

kissed his hand and gave it to all his lords about him, and

thereafter held up his hands to God and yielded the spirit."

There are many pathetic death scenes in history, but few more touching.

His father, after a splendid and prosperous life, had fallen "in the

lost battle, borne down by the flying;" he, after a career almost as

chivalrous and splendid and full of noble work for his country, in a

still more forlorn overthrow; his hopes all gone from him, his strength

broken in his youth. Nothing, it would seem, could save these princes,

so noble and so unfortunate. It was enough to bear the name of James

Stewart to be weighed down by cruel Fate. But before his spirit shook

off the mortal coil a ray of peace had shot through the clouds; he

looked upon the anxious faces of his friends, some of whom at least must

surely have been true friends, bound to him by comradeship and

brotherhood, with that low laugh which is one of the most touching

expressions of weakened and failing humanity--love and kindness in it,

and a certain pleasure to see them round him; and yet to be free of it

all--the heavy kingship, the hopes that ever failed, the friends that so

rarely were true. The lips that touched that cold hand which he kissed

before he gave to them must have trembled, perhaps with compunction, let

us hope with some vow of fidelity to his memory and trust.

Thus died the last of the five Jameses--the last in one sense of that

unfortunate but gallant line. A life more swept by storms, more rent

asunder by conflicting passions and influences, more tragic still and

passionate than theirs, was to part them from the singularly changed,

modified, and modernised successors who, with a difference, were to wear

yet drop this ancient crown. The Stewarts after Mary are no longer like

those that went before. James's dying words came in some curious fashion

true, though not as he thought. It came with a lass and it went with a

lass that ancient crown. When another James reached the throne Scotland

was no more as it had been.

It may seem a fantastic chronology to end here the records of the

Stewards of Scotland: but it is I think justified by this change, which

altered altogether the character of the history and the circumstances of

the monarchs. Henceforward new agencies, new powers, were at work in the

little proud and self-contained kingdom, which had maintained its

independence and individuality so long. Torn asunder by rival

influences, by intrigues incessant and profound, by that struggle

between the old and the new which was never more desperate than in her

bosom, and which, being a religious change chiefly, was one of life and

death: and with a monarch no longer native, but of foreign training and

thoughts, even if she had not been a woman and half a Tudor, the little

ship of State, the gallant little nation, plunged amid waves and

billows, not unfamiliar, indeed, but fiercer and wilder than ever

before, with winds so much increased in force as they raged over wider

seas.

The Stewards of Scotland here ended their special trust and gave in

their account. No race was ever more unfortunate, but I think we may say

that none more nobly endeavoured to discharge that high commission. With

one exception, and that doubtful--for a man may be weak and may not be

brave without being a bad man or even king--every bearer of this fated

name laboured with courage and constancy at the great work of elevating

his country. "Another for Hector!" cried the Highland warrior when his

young chief was in danger, and all the world has read the story with

moistened eyes. Another for Scotland! had been the cry of the house of

Stewart throughout more than a century. As one man fell he handed the

sword to another; to an infant hand trained amid feuds and anarchy, but

always clasping, as soon as it had force enough, the royal weapon with

royal courage and meaning. None of the Jameses lived beyond the earliest

chapter of middle age; all of them succeeded in early youth, most of

them in childhood; and, with but that uncertain exception of James III,

every one of them was actuated by a noble patriotism, and did his

_devoir_ manfully for the improvement and development of his country.

They were noble gentlemen one and all: the bigotry, the egotism, the

obstinacy of the later Stewarts were not in them. Knights and paladins

of an age of romance, they were also stern executors of justice, bold

innovators, with eyes ever open to every expedient of progress and

prosperity. Their faults were those faults of a light heart and genial

temperament, which are the most easily understood and pardoned. Under

their sway their country and their little capital came to be known over

Christendom as not unworthy to hold place among the reigning kingdoms

and cities through which the stream of chivalry flowed. They invented

the trade, the shipping, the laws and civic order of Scotland. Among her

heroes there are none more worthy of everlasting remembrance. They

fulfilled their stewardry with a unity of purpose and a steadfastness of

aim which, when we take into account the continually recurring lapses of

long minorities, is one of the wonders of the time. Edinburgh grew under

their sway from an angry village, lying between a fierce castle and a

rich monastery, little distinguished above its peers, less favoured than

Stirling, less wealthy than the town of St. John, to one of the most

noted of cities, picturesque and splendid, full of noble houses, the

centre of national life and government. And it is curious to record that

no one of the monarchs who brought it such nobility and fame left any

sadness of death to the associations of Edinburgh. They lived and were

wedded and filled with the brightness of their happier moments the town

which afforded so beautiful a scene for all rejoicings: they died on the

field of battle or in other places in conflict or violence or despair.

But Edinburgh only retains the brighter memories, the triumphal

processions, the bridal finery, the jousts and the feasts, the

Parliaments and proclamations of laws and high alliances. The reigns of

the Jameses contain the history of her rise, her splendour, her climax

of beauty and stateliness, without any association of downfall or decay.

PART III

THE TIME OF THE PROPHETS

CHAPTER I

UNDER THE QUEEN REGENT

There is perhaps among the many historical personages attached by close

association to Edinburgh no one so living, so vigorous, so present, as

the great figure of the Reformer and Prophet, who once filled the air

with echoes of his vehement and impassioned oratory, who led both Lords

and Commons, and mated with princes on more than equal terms, the

headstrong, powerful, passionate Preacher, who was at once the leading

spirit of his time and its most vigorous chronicler. To fill the circle

of association, he alone, of all the animated groups who withstood or

who followed him, has left us not only a number of books which disclose

his mind with all its powers and imperfections, but the very dwelling in

which he passed at least the latter part of his life, intact and

authentic, a memorial more striking and attractive than any "storied urn

or animated bust." Nor are even the associations of burial wanting; for

though it is no longer within the solemn enclosure of a churchyard, and

there is no certainty that the stone which is supposed to mark the

position of the Reformer's grave is historically exact, it is yet sure

enough that near by, within reach of the doors of his ancient church,

beneath the pavement trodden by so many feet, his remains repose in the

centre of the life of the Scottish capital, a position more appropriate

than any other that could be imagined. Thus by life and by death this

singular and most evident and unmistakable man, still alive in every

lineament, is connected with the city in which his life was passed, and

in the history of which he can never be forgotten. There may be doubts

about other localities, and it may be difficult to identify the houses

which have been inhabited and the floors that have been trod by other

distinguished personages. Crowding footsteps of the poor have

obliterated the record in many a noble house abandoned by history; even

the fated steps of the Queen save in one bloodstained closet have left

but little authentic trace. But Knox is still present with all the force

of an indestructible individuality--in the existing life of the country

which took so strong an impression from him, and in the absolutely

personal facts of the church in which he preached, the house in which he

lived, the stone under which he lies.

To estimate the share he had in the foundations of that modern Scotland

which has so increased and thriven since his day, is perhaps more hard

now than it was even eighty years ago, when his biography was written by

Dr. M'Crie to the great interest and enthusiasm of the country. The laws

of historical judgment are subject to perpetual change, and the general

estimate of the great personages of the past has undergone various

modifications since that time. Perhaps even the Church is less sure of

her share in the record, less certain of the doom once so unhesitatingly

denounced against "the Paip that Pagan fu' of pride"; less confident of

her own superiority to all other developments of Christianity. The least

enlightened are no longer able to feel with a good conscience, as our

best instructed fathers did, that an important part of religious liberty

was freedom to curse and pull down every tenet other than their own. No

belief has been more obstinate or is more time-honoured: but in theory

at least it has been much subdued in recent times, so that few of us are

able to hold by our own side with the perfect confidence which once we

felt. And in these changing views, and in the impulse towards a greater

catholicity of feeling which has sprung up in Scotland, the influence of

that uncompromising teacher to whom reform was everything, who had no

prepossession in favour of what was old and venerable, but desired with

all the fervour of his fiery soul to make everything new, has doubtless

waned, save to that sacred simplicity of ignorance which forms no

judgment. But nothing can obliterate the person and strenuous being of

John Knox, or make him a less interesting figure on the crowded and

tragic stage of that epoch which he dominated and chronicled. And

nothing can unlink the associations which make him ever present and

living in Edinburgh, which was the capital and centre of his kingdom as

much as of any king who ever breathed.

John Knox was in every sense of the words a son of the soil, yet came of

a not unknown family, "kent folk" of East Lothian: if not lairds of any

great heritage, yet possessing lands and living sufficient to entitle

them to consideration. They were able to give him the best education of

the time, which he completed at the University of Glasgow under the

teaching of Major or Mair, the same whom George Buchanan accompanied to

France; so that both these great men, as well as various nobles and

ecclesiastics of the time, were his fellow-students, trained under the

same influence. Whether Knox followed Major to St. Andrews as Buchanan

followed him to Paris is not known; but he would seem to have lectured

on philosophy in St. Andrews at the beginning of his career. It might be

that he was himself present, and heard some of the bold and familiar

addresses of the wandering friars, the first rude champions of Reform,

whose protest against the wickedness of the bishops and the extortions

of the clergy he quotes with so much enjoyment of their rough humour, in

the beginning of his history; or even might have witnessed the lighted

pile and felt across his face the breath of that "reek" which carried

spiritual contagion with it, as it flew upon the keen breeze from the

sea over that little centre of life, full of scholars and wits, and keen

cynical spectators little likely to be convinced by any such means. It

is curious to hear of Major for instance, one of the Sorbonne, a doctor

of Paris and man of the world, as present at all those proceedings,

listening to Friar William's denunciation of the priests, to which he

gave his assent as "a doctrine that might weill be defended, for it

contayned no heresye"--and in very different circumstances to the

sermons of Rough, addressed to the slayers of the Cardinal, and to the

calling of Knox himself, a crisis of popular emotion and vehement

feeling. Such a man as Major, a son of the Renaissance, no Reformer nor

careful of any of these things, must have looked on with strange

feelings at all the revolutions accomplished before him, the rude jests

and songs, the half-jocular broadly humorous assaults, the cry of

heresy, the horror of the burnings, the deadly earnest of both preacher

and people after Beatoun's well-deserved but terrible end which cut all

compromises short. One wonders what thoughts were going on in the mind

of the old scholar who kept his place in his stall as well when mass was

sung as when every trace of that "idolatrous sacrifice" had been trodden

under foot. Would it be more or less the same to him whatever they

preached, those wild religionists, who tore each other in pieces? did he

look on with a secret smile at the turmoil they made, as if it mattered

which was uppermost, with a natural horror at the fierce flames of the

human sacrifice, yet consent in his mind that if they could so stamp the

heresy out which would otherwise destroy them, the bishops were only

logical to do it? while on the other side there was not much in point of

natural justice to be said against Norman Leslie and his men who slew

the Cardinal. Such spectators there must have been in no small number,

affording a curious rim and edge of observers to all that the more

active and violent might do or say. But these lookers-on have said

nothing on the subject, or their mild voices have been lost in the

clangour of actors vehement and earnest. It has been reserved for our

age to bring these dispassionate or, as we are apt to think, cynical

observers into the front rank.

The first scene in which John Knox comes prominently into sight of the

world occurs in the midst of that small but urgent and much-agitated

society on the fierce little headland by the sea, in the great and noble

cathedral which for most of the intervening time has been nothing but

ruins. We must in imagination rebuild these lofty walls, throw up again

the noble piers and clustered pillars, and see the townsfolk streaming

in--a crowd more picturesque in garb than any Scots assembly nowadays,

with its provost and councillors in their municipal finery: and the

grave representatives of the colleges filing in to their stalls--very

grave now, we may well believe, with many a look at the group of gentry,

among whom were half a dozen men whose hands were stained with the blood

of the Cardinal. No doubt to these spectators, beyond even the great

volume of sound which pealed upward from that vast company, in some

popular hymn or ancient war-cry of a psalm, the stir of the languid

besieging army outside, and the guns of the French Fleet, already on its

way to avenge Beatoun and crush this nest of heretics out, sounded

ominous in the background. Among the congregation was a dark, vehement

man, full of repressed fervour and energy, with two or three lads by his

side, of whom he had charge--strange tutor! flames of zeal and

earnestness burning in his deep-set eyes; the mark of the tonsure (if it

was ever there, which is a doubtful question) obliterated by long

disuse; a man known by the congregation as a zealous instructor of

youth, catechising his boys publicly of afternoons in the cathedral,

vacant then of the many services, the vespers and benedictions, of the

superseded faith.

Knox's gifts and qualities were already well known; he had been a

devoted friend and follower of Wishart, the martyr whose memory was

still fresh in the minds of all men; and these public examinations of

the three boys, and the expositions he addressed to them, but which many

of mature age also gathered to hear, had given the many competent judges

then assembled in the beleaguered city a practical knowledge of his

gifts and endowments. And Rough, who filled the post of preacher in St.

Andrews, was not a man of learning, and in consequence would seem to

have been troubled by disputatious members of the priesthood, eager, not

unnaturally, to defend their own tenets, and with all the authorities at

their fingers' ends. In this strait John Knox was entreated to accept

the charge of the congregation, but in vain. Perhaps the memory of

Wishart's charge to him, "Return to your bairns," was still in his ears;

perhaps the reluctance and hesitation of a man who felt himself

incompetent for so great a responsibility--though it is strange to

associate any idea of shrinking from responsibility with such a

dauntless spirit, and he was by this time a man of forty-two, with a

matured mind and some experience of life. At all events he "utterlie

refused": he "would not run where God had not called him." This being

so, there was no alternative but to take him by surprise and force him

into the position which all desired him to assume. And this was the step

which was accordingly taken by the assembly of the Reformers in St.

Andrews, an assembly in which were many well-known and distinguished

men, so illustrious a councillor as Sir David Lindsay, the poet and

Lyon-King of Scotland, being one of the gentlemen and commoners who

decided upon this dramatic and picturesque call.