CHAPTER IIITHE CHURCH OF ST. GILES:

The moon passed out of Holyrood, white-lipped, to open sky;The night wind whimpered on the Crags to see the ghosts go by;And stately, silent, sorrowful, the lonely lion lay,Gaunt shoulder to the Capital and blind eyes to the Bay.Will H. Ogilvie.

THEREare two Holyroods—Holyrood Abbey, dating back to the twelfth century, and founded by David I.; and Holyrood House, the palace of the Stuarts, dating from fully three centuries later. The Abbey had always contained royal apartments, and had been a place of royal residence in turn with the Castle; and so it was natural that the tradition should be retained, and the royal palace built in connection with the splendid old Abbey. Of the once great and wealthy Abbey of Holyrood only a ruined fragment remains, open to the sky; and of the palace only part of the large sixteenth-century royal residence remains, included in a smaller seventeenth-century building.

EDINBURGH FROM THE CASTLE In the foreground of the picture are the embrasured battlements of the Argyle Battery, at the end of which, over the steps, rises the spire of Tolbooth Church. On a lower level of the Castle, to the spectator’s left, is an iron cage used for beacons. Above this cage and facing the Mound are the Royal Institution and National Gallery, and immediately above the latter is the Scott Monument. The row of trees fronting the tall buildings denote the position of Princes Street running east towards Calton Hill, which appears crowned by the Nelson Monument and backed by the Firth of Forth exactly in the centre of the picture. To the right of Calton Hill on the distant horizon appears the Bass Rock, to the left the coast of Fife with a portion of the island of Inchkeith.EDINBURGH FROM THE CASTLEIn the foreground of the picture are the embrasured battlements of the Argyle Battery, at the end of which, over the steps, rises the spire of Tolbooth Church. On a lower level of the Castle, to the spectator’s left, is an iron cage used for beacons. Above this cage and facing the Mound are the Royal Institution and National Gallery, and immediately above the latter is the Scott Monument. The row of trees fronting the tall buildings denote the position of Princes Street running east towards Calton Hill, which appears crowned by the Nelson Monument and backed by the Firth of Forth exactly in the centre of the picture. To the right of Calton Hill on the distant horizon appears the Bass Rock, to the left the coast of Fife with a portion of the island of Inchkeith.

In the foreground of the picture are the embrasured battlements of the Argyle Battery, at the end of which, over the steps, rises the spire of Tolbooth Church. On a lower level of the Castle, to the spectator’s left, is an iron cage used for beacons. Above this cage and facing the Mound are the Royal Institution and National Gallery, and immediately above the latter is the Scott Monument. The row of trees fronting the tall buildings denote the position of Princes Street running east towards Calton Hill, which appears crowned by the Nelson Monument and backed by the Firth of Forth exactly in the centre of the picture. To the right of Calton Hill on the distant horizon appears the Bass Rock, to the left the coast of Fife with a portion of the island of Inchkeith.

When Edinburgh was only a castle rising out of woods and morasses, with a cluster of wooden, thatched huts below it, all the land lying between the Castle and Arthur’s Seat was part of the unhewn forest of Drumsheugh; and there, where the red elk and the Caledonian boar roamed under primeval oaks, the pious Celtic kings of Scotland were wont to take their pleasure in the chase. David, the last of Malcolm’s five sons who reigned, rode out from the Castle one day, followed by his courtiers, to go a-hunting—this in spite of the protests of his confessor, for it was the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, and a day rather for vigil than for sport. Good fortune could not attend the King in so rebellious a mood. He became separated from the “noys and dyn of bugillis” of the royal hunt, and suddenly found himself alone and confronted by a huge white stag, which, furious and at bay, turned and attacked him. King David defended himself with his short hunting sword, and would have fared but ill had not a miracle happened—a hand from the clouds placed a cross in his hand, before which sacred emblem the white stag fled. And that night, as the awed and wearied monarch slept in the Castle, St. Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, appeared to him, and told him to found yet another monastery on the scene of the miracle. So Holyrood Abbey was founded, and the canons lived in the Castle till their Abbey was ready for them, in all its beauty, in the valley close at the foot of Arthur’s Seat. But David I. of Scotland must not be remembered only as a “sairsanct for the crown,” chidden by his confessor and founding abbeys in obedience to dreams, but as “the beld[6]of all his kyn,” who by his munificence to the Church protected the land from ravage, and fostered arts and learning; who fought with England till Scotland included Durham, Northumberland, and Westmoreland; and who left Scotland peaceful and prosperous. It was in his reign that St. Giles’s assumed the dignity of a parochial Church. The little rough huts of the dwellers in the town, which would naturally have clustered near the Castle to the east—its one not precipitous side, and where was its main entrance—would now tend to straggle down towards the Church and the Abbey, and so began that long street from the Castle to Holyrood—that curious steep mediæval street down the ridge, so characteristic of Old Edinburgh to this very day.

The Celtic dynasty had inherited from Saint Margaret their dutiful generosity to the Church; and in their reigns Holyrood Abbey became very rich and important, and the Augustine canons of Holyrood were permitted to build the Canongate round about, and to rule it as a separate burgh.

But, with the death of Alexander III., the last of the Celtic dynasty, troubled times began for Scotland. First came the patriotic struggle of Sir William Wallace against the English oppression. Then came days of civil wars of the Bruce and that splendid hero the Black Douglas, and all the selfish tyranny of Edward I.of England, ending in the legacy he left to Scotland—a century and a half of incessant war.

Those were days when no man had time to lay his hand to the plough, and no woman bore a son but he was reared a fighter and a hater; when English armies or rude bands of raiders would trample down the growing grain; when, the sound of the axes scarcely still, the little thatched homes of the wooden city would be wantonly kindled and left in smoking ashes and desolation. During all this time, neither was the Abbey of Holyrood spared by the “auld enemy.” In 1322 Edward II. laid it in ashes; and when David II., son of the Bruce, was buried before the High Altar, the silver shrine above it no longer held the miraculous Cross, for it had fallen into the hands of the English at Durham, and had there remained, a venerated exile in their Cathedral.

With the Stuart dynasty, in Holyrood as everywhere else, the age of romance began.

It was in 1429, five years after King James I. had come to Scotland, that a very dramatic scene took place in the Abbey. The King and Queen and Court were present at Mass in Holyrood Church on the Feast of St. Augustine. Suddenly the chanting of the priests broke off as the solemn ceremony was interrupted by the apparition of a half-clad man before the High Altar, who, holding a naked sword by the blade, knelt and presented it to the amazed King. This was the Lord of the Isles, one of the most powerful of the wild Highland chieftains whomJames had been trying to subdue, and who had lately taken arms against the King, and burnt Inverness to the ground. In this savage and poetic way did the great ruined Chieftain give in his desperate submission, and tradition continues the poetry by insisting that it was at the intercession of Queen Jane that his life was spared.

In the same year the twin infant sons of James I. were born in Holyrood Abbey; and, seven years later, when Queen Jane had fled to Edinburgh Castle with her eldest son after the murder of the King at Perth, it was at Holyrood Abbey that the little James II. was hastily crowned. It was at Holyrood Abbey that James II. was married to Mary of Gueldres. Their son, James III., was also married at Holyrood Abbey, to that Margaret of Denmark who sailed into Leith with her Danish fleet, and made Scotland the richer by the Orkneys and Shetlands as her marriage portion.

In the brilliant reign of their son, James IV., Edinburgh consisted of a steep ascent of “stane-sclated” houses climbing the mile and a quarter of ridge from Holyrood to the Castle; and the closes and the pleasure gardens of the “lands” ran down to the edge of the Nor’ Loch, which lay dark and deep, and guarded the town on the north. The city wall, built in 1240 to keep out the “auld enemy,” guarded the town to the south, and climbed over the ridge and met the loch, leaving Holyrood out in the cold,—for consecrated ground was considered safe, and in no need of lay assistance. And here Holyrood lay, the huge Norman Abbey with its open arches, Salisbury Crags and thegreen slopes of Arthur’s Seat behind it, and country in front of it stretching down to the shores of the Forth.

James IV. was crowned at Scone; but it was at Edinburgh he usually held his Court, and what a brilliant Court it must have been! To Edinburgh, as in Spenser’sFaerie Queene, there journeyed, in James IV.’s days, knights from all over Europe, to take part in the famous tournaments held below the Castle Rock or on the open spaces beside Holyrood, and to try and win the lance tipped with pure Scottish gold with which the King rewarded the best tilter. There gathered in Edinburgh, in the days of James IV., not only the flower of chivalry, but men of science, and men of art, and men of learning. Up at the Castle, Borthwick, the Master Gunner, was forging the “Seven Sisters” under James’s supervision. Down at Leith the King delighted in visiting the shipping yards, and seeing the great progress of Scottish trade. At the Provost’s house at St. Giles’s, young Gavin Douglas, son of the great Earl of Angus, was translating Virgil into Scottish verse. In the city, Walter Chepman and Andro Myllar were sending forth that new wonder into the land,—printed books. James not only granted them a patent to print, but endowed their types and bought their books; and in 1510 he granted the estate of Priestfield[7]to Walter Chepman, who paid the crown suit for it by “delivery of a pair of gloves on St. Giles’s day.”[8]Sir Andrew Wood, thatsplendid old sailor and gallant figure in Scottish history, must have been often seen about the streets of Edinburgh and at the Court, and must often have held consultation with the King about James’s darling scheme of a Scottish Navy. Lingering with groups of courtiers in the beautiful precincts of Holyrood, there were many of the great Scottish nobles whose town houses were in the Edinburgh closes,—Angus and Argyle, Mar and Morton, and fifty more. There was the much-travelled friar and Laureate, William Dunbar, “flyting” with his rival poet, “gude Maister Walter Kennedy.” “As a courtier,” writes Mr. Oliphant Smeaton in hisLife of Dunbar,[9]“Dunbar boarded at the King’s expense, and received each year his robe of red velvet fringed with costly fur. He was required to be present at every public function, and, if it presented scope for poetic treatment, to render it into verse. This was the office of a ‘King’s Makar’ or Laureate.” There was Warbeck, the pretended Duke of York, plotting in the shadows and wearying the chivalry of James. There was Don Pedro de Ayala, the courtly Spanish Ambassador (who had come on the pretext of offering James a Spanish princess as his Queen, well aware that there was no Spanish princess), and who was writing home to Ferdinand and Isabella enthusiastic descriptions of King James, Scotland, and the Scottish people. “The kingdom is very old, and very noble, and the king possessesgreat virtues, and no defects worth mentioning.”[10]“An open and magnificent court,” Drummond of Hawthornden acknowledges it; and Dunbar gives a picture of the diversity of men that James IV.’s many interests brought round him:—

Kirkmen, courtmen, and craftsmen fine,Doctors in jure and medicyne:Divinours, rhetours, and philosophours:Astrologists, artists, and oratours:Men of armes and valliant knights:And mony other goodly wights:Musicians, minstrels, and merry singers,Chevalouris, callandaris, and flingars,Cunyeours, carvours, and carpenters,Builders of barks and ballingars,Masouns, lying upon the land,And ship wrights hewing upon the strand,Glasing wrights, goldsmiths, and lapidaris,Printers, paintours, and potingaris.

And the King who presided over all this, if but half of De Ayala’s praises be true, was himself as skilled in the arts of peace as of war, spoke eight languages, and said “all his prayers.”[11]Holbein’s miniature is a witness of his personal beauty. All agree that he was a fearless rider, a chivalrous knight, and a brave man. But he was sensitive, subject to sudden fits of depression alternating with his gay humour, and it is told of him that, though he had been but a boy when his father’s estranged nobles had used him as a figure-headfor their rebellion, yet he always wore to the day of his death a hidden chain round his body, in constant penance for his father’s death.

In his thirtieth year King James married little Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII. of England. The marriage was brought about by the persistence of Henry VII., and was nowise according to the inclinations of the Scottish King, who evaded it for several years after it was first proposed to him. But State reasons prevailed, and at last James gave way. The bridegroom was thirty and the bride was fourteen. But, if James was a tardy wooer, the florid little Tudor had nothing to complain of in the chivalry of the welcome she received from the courteous and sensitive Stuart.

In August 1503 she was brought to Scotland, with a train of knights and nobles, and James rode as far as Dalkeith to meet her, “gallantly dressed in a jacket of crimson velvet bordered with cloth of gold.”[12]Before the procession entered the city the King mounted in front of his bride on her palfrey—his own charger being too restive to bear a double burden—and so they rode into the decorated and expectant capital, where the people filled the windows, and gaily dressed ladies thronged the “fore-stairs”—open stairways outside the houses,—and all shouted or waved their loyalty and their welcome. Tournaments and shows took place; and, when they were alone, the king played to the little princess on the virginal, and

HOLYROOD PALACE FROM THE PUBLIC GARDENS UNDER CALTON HILL Holyrood Palace stretches across the picture east and west, and is dominated by Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags. The dark turret at the west end of the nearest and north wing contains the private supper-room of Queen Mary, the room from which the Italian Rizzio was taken to his death. The end of the south wing shows beyond, and through a gap in the mean buildings, occupying the foreground of the picture, is seen the open space in front of the Palace, the restored fountain, and the entrance to a carriage road called the Queen’s Drive. The conical roofs of the towers of the Guard House appear to the extreme right. The gable and east window of the Chapel Royal (part of the ancient Abbey), together with the tower, show at the eastern extremity of the north wing.HOLYROOD PALACE FROM THE PUBLIC GARDENS UNDER CALTON HILLHolyrood Palace stretches across the picture east and west, and is dominated by Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags. The dark turret at the west end of the nearest and north wing contains the private supper-room of Queen Mary, the room from which the Italian Rizzio was taken to his death. The end of the south wing shows beyond, and through a gap in the mean buildings, occupying the foreground of the picture, is seen the open space in front of the Palace, the restored fountain, and the entrance to a carriage road called the Queen’s Drive. The conical roofs of the towers of the Guard House appear to the extreme right. The gable and east window of the Chapel Royal (part of the ancient Abbey), together with the tower, show at the eastern extremity of the north wing.

Holyrood Palace stretches across the picture east and west, and is dominated by Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags. The dark turret at the west end of the nearest and north wing contains the private supper-room of Queen Mary, the room from which the Italian Rizzio was taken to his death. The end of the south wing shows beyond, and through a gap in the mean buildings, occupying the foreground of the picture, is seen the open space in front of the Palace, the restored fountain, and the entrance to a carriage road called the Queen’s Drive. The conical roofs of the towers of the Guard House appear to the extreme right. The gable and east window of the Chapel Royal (part of the ancient Abbey), together with the tower, show at the eastern extremity of the north wing.

then listened with bent knee and bared head whilst she sang and played to him. The marriage took place at Holyrood with much magnificence; and Dunbar the Laureate wrote “The Thristle and the Rois.” All this life and poetry and splendour glowed in Holyrood, in a braver and a warmer time than ours,—perhaps the brightest age Edinburgh has known. Little wonder that Dunbar pitied his royal master when he had to leave it even for a visit to Stirling, and wrote greeting to him from—

We that here in Hevenis glory. . . . . . . . . .I mean we folk in ParadyisIn Edinburgh with all merriness.

But bright things come quickly to confusion. As always, the undoing of the brave little land was brought about by England. Ten years after that marriage day at Holyrood there gathered at midnight, in the moonshine at the city Cross of Edinburgh, a spectral throng of heralds and pursuivants. Trumpets sounded, and the terrified spectators heard a ghostly voice read “the awful summons” to King James and to his Scottish chivalry: the long death-roll of all who were to fall at Flodden. Outside the city, on the Boroughmuir (part of the old hunting-ground of the forest of Drumsheugh, now a built-over suburb, but whose every inch is historic ground) lay the whole encamped host of the Scottish army. When the sun next morning rose in the August sky, it lit up a thousand pavilions white as snow, a thousandstreamers flaunting over them, and reared in their midst the huge royal banner of Scotland, with its “ruddy lion ramped in gold,”—all in readiness to start on the fatal march towards Flodden. The army moved on southward, leaving every home, from the palace to the hovel, bereft of father and sons: and the women waited.

Suddenly the stillness was broken, as the first wind whispers over the land and troubles the trees with warning of a storm; and the people—the women and the old men and the children—looked into one another’s blanched faces and ran out into the street to learn the truth. One man, escaped from the field of carnage, had brought the tidings to Edinburgh. And then the storm burst.

Woe, and woe, and lamentation!What a piteous cry was there!Widows, maidens, mothers, children,Shrieking, sobbing in despair!Through the streets the death-word rushes,Spreading terror, sweeping on—“Jesu Christ! Our King has fallen—O Great God, King James is gone!Holy Mother Mary, shield us,Thou who erst did lose thy Son!O the blackest day for ScotlandThat she ever knew before!O our King—the good, the noble,Shall we see him never more?Woe to us, and woe to Scotland!O our sons, our sons and men!Surely some have ’scaped the Southron?Surely some will come again?”Till the oak that fell last winterShall uprear its shattered stem,Wives and mothers of Dunedin,Ye may look in vain for them![13]

All this Edinburgh has seen and known and felt. Remember it, as you walk in her streets to-day—it is not good for us for the heroic to be forgotten.

And how did Edinburgh take the blow? The first sound the people heard, breaking through their cries of grief, was a Proclamation that “all maner of personis ... haue reddye thair fensible geir and wapponis for weir,” for defence of the town, and that “wemen of gude pas to the kirk and pray.”[14]An indomitable race, that nothing could crush! The arms in readiness were not needed, however; England was too crippled to move.

After another long minority, such as had occurred with each of the Jameses, the wax candles at Holyrood once again lit up Court scenes. The royal palace, the building of which had been begun about 1503 by James IV.,[15]had been inhabited in the interval by the Duke of Albany, the Regent, during his sojourns in Scotland, who had, no doubt, brought his French ideas of elegance to bear on it. James V.,—the “Red Tod” of so many adventures,—who had been born within its walls, held his councils and his Court there, and, between1529 and 1535, completed the building begun by his father, and spoilt by the English soldiers. To Holyrood, when he was but two-and-twenty, James V. brought his fragile little French bride, Madeleine, daughter of Francis I., whom he had married in Nôtre Dame at Paris. The poet Ronsard was a twelve-year-old page in the Queen’s train when she came to Holyrood; and another in her train was the founder of the great Scottish family of Hope, including that Sir Thomas Hope who was King’s Advocate in Charles I.’s time. The gentle French princess, when she landed with James at Leith on the 19th of May 1537, was already dying of consumption. She stooped and kissed the “Scottis eard” when she set foot on it; and seven weeks afterwards, within Holyrood Abbey, she was laid pitifully beneath the same kindly “Scottis eard.”

Thief! saw thou nocht the great preparativesOf Edinburgh, the noble famous town?Thou saw the people labouring for their livesTo mak triumph with trump and clarioun:Sic pleasour never was in this regiounAs suld have been the day of her entrace,With great propinis given to her Grace.Provost, Bailies, and Lordis of the town,The Senatours, in order consequent,Cled into silk of purpur, black, and brown;Syne the great Lordis of the Parliament,With mony knichtly Baron and Banrent,In silk and gold, in colours comfortable:But thou, alas! all turnit into sable.[16]

Provost, Bailies, and Lordis of the town,The Senatours, in order consequent,Cled into silk of purpur, black, and brown;Syne the great Lordis of the Parliament,With mony knichtly Baron and Banrent,In silk and gold, in colours comfortable:But thou, alas! all turnit into sable.[16]

James V. had not a happy reign. His boyhood had been one of restraint under the tyranny of nobles; and, after eight years of putting his kingdom into order and subduing the troublesome Douglases, his journey to France to seek a bride had thus ended tragically in her death. The vagaries of his mother, Margaret Tudor, who, after her husband’s fall at Flodden, had emulated her brother Henry VIII. in her marriages and divorcings and remarryings, must have made her a domestic trouble to her son; and abroad, constant wars with England broke his spirit. Four years after his second wife, Mary of Lorraine, had landed at Crail to become Queen of Scotland, James V., though not yet thirty years old, was a miserable, half demented, sorely stricken man, dragging himself home on the tidings of the disastrous defeat of Solway Moss, first to Edinburgh, and then to the greater seclusion of Falkland. There, hearing of the last trouble of all, that the child to whom Mary of Lorraine had given birth at Linlithgow was a daughter, he, like Ahab of old, turned his face to the wall. “It cam’ wi’ a lass, and it’ll gang wi’ a lass,—and the deil gang wi’ it!” he cried: and so the Red Tod died.

The next scene at Holyrood is twenty years after, and the palace in the plain, and the Castle on the height, and the city between, are all covered with a thick, heavy white mist, like that which shrouded Malcolm Canmore’s children as they escaped from the Castle with their mother’s coffin. The “haar” has crept up from the Firth of Forth, and the Firth of Forth is lost in impenetrable fog; but this time it is not a ferry-boatbearing a dead Queen across to Dunfermline, but a State galley bringing a living Queen home from France.

Mary Stuart, surrounded by her Scottish and French retinue, and with three of her French Guise and Lorraine uncles on board, and her four Scottish Marys in attendance, sailed up the Firth of Forth on Tuesday, 19th of August 1561, in so dense a mist that none could see from the stern of the vessel to her prow. “Si grand brouillard,” the horrified Sieur de Brantôme called it. Truly, if Queen Margaret’s haar was miraculous, Queen Mary’s haar was prophetic; for little indeed did the Stuart Princess see of what lay before her in Scotland.

The people of Leith and Edinburgh were taken by surprise, not having expected their Queen for another week, and nothing was ready for her reception,—except the haar. She rode in state to Holyrood next day. The “grand brouillard” would have prevented her from seeing anything except a vista of mist and drizzle, and no doubt she was glad to dismount and find herself in the light and warmth of the palace, with her four Marys and her French-speaking courtiers gazing curiously about them at their new surroundings.

It was not many hours before Queen Mary was to learn to how different a Scotland she had come from the Catholic Scotland her father and grandfathers had known. After she had supped, and whilst the bonfires still burnt on Arthur’s Seat, and the crowds were dispersing home through the foggy streets, the weary Queen wished to rest. Suddenly a noise;—a crowd of aboutfive hundred people had gathered below the palace windows, and were serenading the Catholic Queen by singing her Protestant psalms to the accompaniment of fiddles. “Vile fiddles and rebecks,” Brantôme designates them; and adds that the crowds sang “so ill and with such bad accord that there could be nothing worse. Ah! what music, and what a lullaby for the night!” Yes, Sieur de Brantôme! And what a different picture from that of James IV. kneeling bareheaded before little Margaret Tudor whilst she played to him on the virginal!

So, with a “grand brouillard,” with a serenade of psalms ill sung to fiddles, and with a riot in her chapel during Mass, Queen Mary’s life and troubles at Holyrood began.

Although the first stress of the religious revolution had greatly changed the daily life and the characters of the people, it had as yet not spoilt Holyrood Abbey, and Queen Mary saw it as the royal Jameses had seen it, in all its grandeur of size and its grace of early Norman architecture, as it had been built by David I. The armies of Henry VIII., it is true, had recently plundered and burnt it; but English fire never made much impression on Scottish stone.

The palace of Holyrood adjoining the Abbey was built round a great square court, with a towered and pinnacled frontage facing a huge outer courtyard separating the palace precincts from the fringes of the town, and at the back meeting the Abbey. The whole palace and its extensions and smaller courts were setin walled grounds, stretching to the base of Arthur’s Seat. These included pleasure gardens, plantations, and buildings, among which was the quaint building still called “Queen Mary’s Bath.” The north-west corner of the palace proper terminated in a turreted tower which contained Queen Mary’s rooms, and this tower, rebuilt by James V. on the foundations of James IV.’s building, still forms part of the modern Holyrood, and in it, to-day, Mary’s life stands revealed. In these rooms she moved and smiled, spoke and wept. Here it was that she tried, with her beauty and her wit and her courtesy and her wonderful power of forbearance, to soften her rude nobles and turn their harsh disapproval into loyalty. Here, in the audience chamber, the first two of her famous interviews with John Knox took place. In Queen Mary’s day most of the ground now devoted to the formal grass and gravel of unused palace gardens was covered by the great Abbey. It was at the High Altar of this Abbey, where the Royal Jameses had led their very youthful brides, that Queen Mary, dressed in a robe of black velvet, was married, between five and six o’clock one Sunday morning in July, to her cousin Lord Darnley, a dissipated boy of nineteen. It was in the tiny little room leading off the Queen’s room, where the lifted tapestry still shows the entrance to the secret stair between her room and Darnley’s, that she sat at supper on the night of Riccio’s murder. With her were her sister the Countess of Argyle, and several of the Household, including the lay Abbot of Holyrood, and the Queen’s Secretary, the doomed Riccio. Darnley enteredand seated himself. At that signal suddenly there broke in upon them the brutal Lord Ruthven, followed by the other assassins, and seized the Italian favourite who was clinging to the Queen’s skirts for protection and crying “Sauve ma vie, Madame! sauve ma vie!” The table was thrown down on the Queen as they struggled, and one of the murderers levelled a pistol at her. They dragged the bleeding body out, across the Queen’s bedroom to the entrance of the presence chamber, where they despatched him with “whingers and swords,” and the blood from his fifty-six wounds soaked through the wooden floor. All that night the outraged Queen was a captive in her own palace, whence the Earls of Bothwell and Huntly had escaped by ropes from the back windows. The Provost and town “caused ring their common bell,” and came to see to the safety of their Queen; but the Queen was told by her lords, her husband’s accomplices, that they would “cut her into collops and cast her over the wall if she attempted to speak to them.” All this a few months before the birth of her child.

Stern swords are drawn, and daggers gleam—her words, her prayers are vain—The ruffian steel is in his heart—the faithful Rizzio’s slain!Then Mary Stuart brushed aside the tears that trickling fell:“Now for my father’s arm,” she said, “my woman’s heart, farewell!”[17]

A year later, on the night of Sunday, 9th February 1567, there were doings grave and gay in Edinburgh. Darnley lay “full of small-pox in a velvet-hung bedin an upper storey of the Prebendaries’ chamber at Kirk-o’-Field. The infant Prince James slept in his carved cradle at Holyrood. Bastian, one of the Queen’s servants, was celebrating his marriage in the palace. The “Queen’s Grace” went from her husband’s sick-room, afoot under a silken canopy, with a guard of Archers, “with licht torches up the Blackfriar Wynd,” to attend the masque at Holyrood in honour of the marriage. Lord Bothwell, disguised in “a loose cloak such as the Swartrytters wear,”[18]skulked with his accomplices in the shadows of the Cowgate. And then—“a little after two hours after midnight, the house wherein the King was lodged was in an instant blown in the air,”—and Darnley was dead.

It was to Holyrood that Darnley’s body was brought, and the Queen lay in a darkened room and her voice sounded “very doleful.” Well it might, for the vicious Darnley dead and embalmed was to prove a greater curse to her than had proved the vicious Darnley living.

It was in the old Chapel at Holyrood, at two o’clock on a May morning three months later, that Queen Mary was married to Bothwell, “not with the Mass, but with preaching,” by Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney. “At this marriage there was neither pleasure nor pastime used, as use was wont to be used when princes were married.”[19]There were at least two causes and

THE APARTMENTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS IN HOLYROOD PALACE An ancient bed hung with faded crimson silk stands in Queen Mary’s bed-chamber, together with chairs and other furniture of a later date. Under the raised tapestry on the far side of the room is an open door, through which is entered the private supping-room of Queen Mary, and from which the Italian Rizzio was dragged to his death by the conspirators. They gained admittance to the apartments by the small door closely adjoining the supping-room. The ceiling of the bedroom is of wood, divided into panels, decorated with initials and coats-of-arms.THE APARTMENTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS IN HOLYROOD PALACEAn ancient bed hung with faded crimson silk stands in Queen Mary’s bed-chamber, together with chairs and other furniture of a later date. Under the raised tapestry on the far side of the room is an open door, through which is entered the private supping-room of Queen Mary, and from which the Italian Rizzio was dragged to his death by the conspirators. They gained admittance to the apartments by the small door closely adjoining the supping-room. The ceiling of the bedroom is of wood, divided into panels, decorated with initials and coats-of-arms.

An ancient bed hung with faded crimson silk stands in Queen Mary’s bed-chamber, together with chairs and other furniture of a later date. Under the raised tapestry on the far side of the room is an open door, through which is entered the private supping-room of Queen Mary, and from which the Italian Rizzio was dragged to his death by the conspirators. They gained admittance to the apartments by the small door closely adjoining the supping-room. The ceiling of the bedroom is of wood, divided into panels, decorated with initials and coats-of-arms.

just impediments why those two persons should not have been joined together in holy Matrimony; but none declared them.

It was to Holyrood that Queen Mary was brought on foot at eight o’clock on the evening of the day after the battle of Carberry Hill; after the parting with Bothwell; after the hootings and hideous insults of the mobs gathered in the windows and on the fore-stairs as she rode vanquished through her capital. She had spent the night “in the Provost’s lodging” in the town. Thence she was brought to Holyrood for a wretched interval before she was forced to ride, “mounted on a sorry hackney,” at a furious pace all the June night, between the coarse and brutal Ruthven and Lindsay, “men of savage manners, even in that age,” says Mignet, to Lochleven and captivity.

After the days of the hapless Queen Mary the history of Holyrood consists only of a series of more or less dramatic scenes. The first three of these are in James VI.’s reign, and end the days when Holyrood was the home of a Royal race. James VI.’s two sons, Prince Henry, afterwards the friend of Sir Walter Raleigh, and Prince Charles, afterwards Charles I., were christened at Holyrood. All the earls of James VI.’s creation were created at Holyrood. And it was into the courtyard of Holyrood, on Saturday evening the 26th of March 1603, when the King and Queen had supped and retired, and “the palace lights were going out one by one,” that Sir Robert Carey clattered, half dead with fatigue and excitement, having ridden fromLondon to Edinburgh in three days, and dropt on his knees before the King and cried, “Queen Elizabeth is dead, and your Majesty is King of England.”

Did the shades of all the brave and splendid Scottish kings hover near as the words were spoken? Bruce, who fought at Bannockburn—Bruce, whose daughter Marjory was the mother of the first Stuart king; all the Stuarts, down to the gallant James who had ridden into his capital with his Tudor bride behind him on the palfrey, and had fallen on the field of Flodden; their son who, with Tudor blood in his veins, had died cursing England, and whose daughter the English Elizabeth had beheaded—did all their shades hover near as the words were spoken in Holyrood? James VI., eighth of the line from the High Steward of Scotland, knew himself to be King of the “auld enemy”—and the lights of Holyrood went out one by one.

But as, at the end of the play, the curtain is raised once or twice after it has fallen, and the scene-shifters stand back in the wings whilst the gaily dressed figures bow before an applauding audience, so the curtain has been raised once or twice on Holyrood to the sound of the multitude huzzaing. One such occasion was when Charles I. was crowned at Holyrood. A brilliant day for Edinburgh—a revival of the royal pageantries once so familiar in her streets; a long procession from the Castle to Holyrood between lines of soldiers in white satin doublets and black velvet breeches and plumed hats; a long procession of nobles on horseback, of heralds and trumpeters, of bishops with lawnsleeves, of civic dignitaries in scarlet and ermine; a flash of colour winding down the mediæval street, as of old, from the Castle to the Palace—and then Charles returned to England, and the curtain fell.

It was Charles II., the Merry Monarch, who rebuilt Holyrood and gave it its present aspect. His own desire was to erect a large new palace, such as Charles I. had contemplated building. In the Bodleian Library at Oxford is a plan of the second storey, dated October 1663, and endorsed “the surveyes and plat mead by John Mylne, his Majestie’s Mr. Massone,” and to it is attached by sealing-wax a piece of paper, on which is written: “This was his Majesties blessed fatheres intentione in anno 1633.”[20]

James VII., while Duke of York, held Court in Holyrood and restored the Abbey Church, and had Mass celebrated in it for his Catholic subjects. News of the landing of William of Orange gave lawlessness the leave, and the Presbyterian mob sacked the Chapel, burnt the Altar and organ at the City Cross, and desecrated the royal vault, tearing open the leaden coffins of the dead Kings and Queens of Scotland. But in 1745 the curtain rose once again, and for the last time, on the Stuart drama.

Edinburgh was filled with loyal Highlanders, was noisy with the skirling of pipes and the din of bugles, and Edinburgh folk went decorated with white cockades, and the air was charged with excitement. There rode up to the door of Holyrood that “gallant and handsomeyoung Prince, who threw himself on the mercy of his countrymen, rather like a hero of romance than a calculating politician.”[21]How did they receive him?—

As he cam’ marching doon the street,The pipes played loud and clear;And a’ the folk cam’ rinnin’ ootTo meet the Chevalier!Oh, Charlie is my darling!...

Holyrood again sheltered a Stuart, and all was hope and enthusiasm. It was in the long picture-gallery of Holyrood Palace that Scotland’s capital gathered her beauty and her chivalry, and gave her ball in the Prince’s honour,—that ball immortalised inWaverley.

Again the curtain fell, and the scene-shifters peopled the stage.

In the middle of the eighteenth century the ruinous roof of the Abbey, ill repaired, fell in, carrying with it the ancient arches. The ruins were desecrated, filled with rubbish and insulted, the coffins of the dead were stolen, and the skulls and bones of kings and queens lay exposed, exhibited—were carried away, and lost. Among them was the gentle Madeleine who had kissed the “Scottis eard.” Holyrood Abbey had survived over six centuries the invasions of the wanton English, only to be laid in ruins by the citizens of Edinburgh themselves.

GAVIN DOUGLAS, JOHN KNOX, AND JENNY GEDDES

Age to age succeeds,Blowing a noise of tongues and deeds,A dust of systems and of creeds.Tennyson.

THEREis a saying that no one who has suffered an Episcopalian childhood knows the story of Jonah and the gourd, and that the reply given is invariably, “Jonah and the gourd? Thegourd? What about a gourd? I know all about thewhale, of course!” It is observable that the ordinary tourist who visits Edinburgh associates St. Giles’s Church with the one incident of Jenny Geddes throwing her stool at the dean—an incident of which it might be submitted that, like the connection between Jonah and the whale, it was perhaps not the most dignified, though certainly an uncomfortably dramatic, moment of its history. The Church of St. Giles, like the prophet, had had other experiences—which is perhaps not wonderfulwhen one recollects that it was in all probability the parish church of “Edwinsburch” in the ninth century. It was certainly there in the days of David I., when Edinburgh was a cluster of huts, built of the wood and thatched with the boughs of the forest of Drumsheugh, with its dominating fortress up on the rock, its great Abbey down on the plain, and half-way on the slope between them the beautiful little massive early Norman Church. From its belfry, as the sun rose high over the Forth beyond the Calton Hill, the bell would toll the pious Scots to Matins, or to Vespers when it sank red at the back of their Castle.

This early parochial church—probably built on the site of a still older church, and that again maybe on the site of some heathen temple—was, on the 6th of October 1243, in the reign of Alexander II., dedicated to St. Giles by David de Bernham, Norman Bishop of St. Andrews.[22]The church, like all other buildings in Edinburgh, suffered much at the hands of the English Edwards, of Richard II. of England, and of Henry VIII. of England; and the marks of the flames of those ruthless invaders are still visible on the pillars of the choir. If it was misused by the “auld enemy,” it was—until the Reformation—well treated by its own people. It was restored from Richard’s fire, and building went on until Flodden. In 1387 five chapels were added on the south of the Nave, “thekyt” with stone, by three well-paid Scottish masons, on the model

Back to Index Next