“Oh for one hour of Wallace wight,Or well-skilled Bruce to rule the fight,And cry ‘St. Andrew and our right!’Another sight had seen that morn,From Fate’s dark book a leaf been torn,And Flodden had been Bannockbourne”—
“Oh for one hour of Wallace wight,Or well-skilled Bruce to rule the fight,And cry ‘St. Andrew and our right!’Another sight had seen that morn,From Fate’s dark book a leaf been torn,And Flodden had been Bannockbourne”—
“Oh for one hour of Wallace wight,
Or well-skilled Bruce to rule the fight,
And cry ‘St. Andrew and our right!’
Another sight had seen that morn,
From Fate’s dark book a leaf been torn,
And Flodden had been Bannockbourne”—
we hear the patriot as well as the poet. Yet it is the truth that the Scots at Flodden fought no less valiantly than their ancestors had done at Bannockburn. But their king, though a gallant soldier, as in many respects he was a wise statesman, and, like most of his house, an accomplished man, was as bad a general as ever led brave men to destruction; while Surrey could not only head a charge, but play a cunning and wary game. It was not the first time the men had met. Ten years before, the English noble had handed to the Scottish king his bride, Margaret Tudor—then, a girl of fourteen, her mind teeming with dreams of imminent happiness; now, a sad and lonely woman, awaiting tidings of the strife betwixt her husband and her brother which all her tears and caresses had been impotent to avert.
At Coldstream, a couple of miles or so farther up the Tweed, pleasantlygirdled with trees, we are still in the thick of military memories. Not far from where Smeaton’s bridge gives a choice view both up and down stream is the first ford of any importance above Berwick. Here Edward I. crossed in 1296; here also Leslie and his Covenanters crossed in 1640 on their way south. At Coldstream, too, rather more than twenty years afterwards, the general who could make a king and hold his tongue disbanded his regiment as soldiers of the Commonwealth and re-embodied it as the Coldstream Guards before setting forth to undo the work in which the Covenanters had borne so large a share. It was by this ford, again, that Marmion, in his haste not to miss the fighting, made his perilous passage across the stream, having spent the night at Lennel’s Convent, of which “one frail arch” is all that is left.
COLDSTREAM BRIDGE, FROM UP-STREAM.COLDSTREAM BRIDGE, FROM UP-STREAM.
COLDSTREAM BRIDGE, FROM UP-STREAM.
A little above the spot “where to the Tweed Leat’s eddies creep,” on the southern bank, is a fragment of Wark Castle. According to Leland, it was “causid to be made” by Henry II. It twice repulsed attack at the hands of David I.; and when on the second occasion he had reduced it by blockade, he thought it well “to ding it doon.” But it was rebuilt by Henry, and gave the Scots much further trouble before its final demolition—probably just after the union of the Crowns, when so many Border strongholds were dismantled. When, about the middle of the fourteenth century, David Bruce laid siege to it, the governor himself, Sir William Montague, mounted on a “wight” steed, penetrated the investing lines one dark and stormy night, and carried word to the king, Edward III., of what was happening at Wark, and so the siege was raised. The castle had been Edward’s wedding-gift to the Earl of Salisbury, and the countess was here when he relieved it. She was naturally grateful, and her liege complacent; and the gossips say that in this wise began the romance of which one incident was the establishment of the Order of the Garter. The king was certainly in a perilous situation, for had he not just rescued the lady from one?
RUINS OF WARK CASTLE.RUINS OF WARK CASTLE.
RUINS OF WARK CASTLE.
As the stream is traced upwards, the banks not seldom break into cliffs, the valley gains in breadth and richness, and away to the north the sky-line is broken by the round top of Dunse Law. Nearly midway between Coldstream and Kelso the Tweed ceases to be the Border river, and enters the shire of Roxburgh, and a little higher up it takes toll of the “troutful Eden,” which on its way down from the slopes of Boon Hill has watered the village of Ednam (Edenham), where “the sweet poet of the year” was born. A couple of miles or so away to the south is Hadden Rig, scene of the fight between the English and Scottish Marchwardens in 1542. Sir Robert Bowes, Governor of Norham, had, with three thousand horse, ravaged a large part of Teviotdale, and was marching on Jedburgh, when he encountered George Gordon, Earl of Huntly, and, with several of his colleagues and many of his men, was taken prisoner. Fighting on the English side was the exiled Earl of Angus, who only by a desperate exercise of strength and activity escaped capture and the traitor’s doom which would inevitably have followed.
Kelso and its Abbey—Roxburghe Castle—Floors Castle—The Teviot—Ancrum—Carlenrig—The Ale—The Jed and Jedburgh—Mertoun—Smailholm Tower and Sandyknowe—Eildon and Sir Michael Scott—Dryburgh—The Leader and Thomas the Rhymer—Melrose—Skirmish Hill—Abbotsford—The Ettrick and the Yarrow—Ashestiel—Innerleithen—Horsburgh Castle—Peebles—Neidpath—Manor—Drummelzier—The Crook Inn—Tweedswell.
WhenBurns came to Kelso in the spring of 1787, and stood upon the bridge which preceded Rennie’s fine piece of work, he is said to have reverently uncovered his head and breathed a prayer to the Almighty. A less religious nature than his might well have been moved to the devotional mood, for there can be few scenes so charged with inspiring and exalting influences. If Leyden did not quite hit the mark in saying of the Tweed here that she “her silent way majestic holds,” it is only because she chants as she goes: august her course certainly is, for she rolls broad and brisk, and flows into queenly curves. On the one hand is Sir George Douglas’s place, Springwood Park, the entrance dignified by some glorious bronze beeches; on the other are the stately ruins of the Abbey; and beyond, the town, neat and clean, gleaming white in the sunshine. Up stream, full in front, stands the palatial Floors Castle, not far from where the Teviot pours its hurrying tide into the Tweed; below bridge the spacious current ripples between thickly wooded banks. The town itself has many interests, modern as well as ancient. For some months towards the end of last century a boy, slightly lame, and much given to poring over old romances, attended the old grammar-school adjacent to the abbey, and still carried on there, though in a new building; and here began that acquaintance with the Ballantynes which was to have such ruinous issues. With another true minstrel also, though one who sings in a lower key, the town has associations. The Free Church, one of the white spired edifices visible from the bridge, was built for Horatius Bonar, who during a long ministry here wrote some sacred songs which men will not soon let die. Against the Free Church nothing need be urged except its newness; but the parish church—octagonal, with a huge slated roof, divided into as many sections—is a building of simply audacious uncouthness, a sight to make “sair eyes.” It has been said to be the ugliest parish church in Scotland, and the statement might be amplified and still remain true. During the eighteenth century the parishioners were pleased to commend themselves to the divine mercy in the dismantled abbey, a low vault having been thrown over the transept; while right overhead, under a roof of thatch, certain of their fellows were all the while enduring the rigours of human justice. This felicitous arrangement survived until about 1771, when one Sunday the falling of a lump of plaster from the roof sent thecongregation scampering out with the words of an oracular prophecy attributed to Thomas the Rhymer ringing in their ears. Then they set up this detestable building, fashioned in the style of an auction mart, within a stone’s-throw of the venerable walls in which they were too superstitious to longer assemble themselves together!
The remains of the Abbey are not considerable, consisting of a part of the central tower, about half of the west front, bits of the transept walls, and some fragments of the choir. The style is an interesting mixture of Romanesque and Early Pointed; thus there are round-headed doorways with zigzag mouldings, and series of those intersecting arches which mark the transition from the one style to the other; while the two surviving arches that support the central tower are Early Pointed. Less graceful than the remains of Melrose Abbey, which are much later, they have a massive dignity distinctly superior to those of Dryburgh, which come nearer to them in style. In Burton’s opinion, there was no other building in all Scotland which bore so close a resemblance to a Norman castle. It was of course its position in the Debateable Land which prompted its builders to invest it with such strength and solidity. And the days came when it needed all its power of resistance, and more besides, since it often had to bear the brunt of battering-ram, of cannon-shot, and of the still more deadly faggot. Its visitations culminated in 1545, the year when the Earl of Hertford, better known as the Protector Somerset, made his terrible descent upon the northern kingdom. On this occasion it was bravely held by about a hundred defenders, including a dozen of its monks; but it was breached and stormed, and “as many Scots slain as were within.” Thus it came about that there was only a remnant of the brotherhood left for the Reformers to expel fifteen years later; and the iconoclasts on principle must have found the wrecking of the building an easy enough task. When the vast possessions of the monastery came to be dealt with, the prudence, if not the generosity, of James VI. reminded him that he had favourites. In the previous reign the abbacy had been conferred upon James Stuart, one of the king’s natural sons, while others of his bastards battened upon the revenues of divers other abbeys. On its practical side, it is clear, the Reformation came none too soon.
The Abbey of Kelso, like those at Melrose and Jedburgh, and several more in other parts of Scotland, owes its foundation to David I., the pious son of a pious mother—“St.” David, as he is often called. Standing at his tomb at Dunfermline, the first of the Jameses, whose taste ran to poetry rather than to piety, and to pursuits yet more frivolous, is said to have uttered the much-quoted remark that his predecessor was “ane sair sanct for the Crown,” thinking the while of the revenues which had been alienated to religious uses. The reflection is generally taken seriously, but the wisest of the Stuarts must have meant it at least as much in jest as in earnest. David was, in truth, anything but an ignorant, impulsive fanatic. His training at the refined court of Henry I. had rubbed off “the rust of Scottish barbarity,” as an outspoken English annalist puts it; and coming to his kingship an educated and accomplished man, he set about reducing hisrude realm to order and civilisation; and in fulfilment of this mission castles were built, burghs erected, and religious establishments founded. Those were the palmy days of monasticism, when religious houses had not come to be filled with ecclesiastics of the type of Friar John of Tillmouth, and the Abbot of Kennaquhair in the “Monastery;” and if it can be said of St. David that “he succeeded in reducing a wild part of Scotland to order,” it is chiefly because he gave so powerful a stimulus to the agencies of the Church.
KELSO, WITH RENNIE’S BRIDGE.KELSO, WITH RENNIE’S BRIDGE.
KELSO, WITH RENNIE’S BRIDGE.
Between Kelso Abbey and Roxburghe Castle, represented by a small fragment on a ridge just where the Teviot and the Tweed mingle their waters, a close connection is to be traced, for the fortress was once a royal residence, inhabited by St. David himself; and when his one son Henry died within its walls, the body was borne into the church, and there with solemn pomp interred. And when three centuries later James II., at a spot said to be marked by the large holly near the margin of the Tweed, was killed by the bursting of “The Lion” while attempting to wrest the castle from the hands of the English, his son was carried by the nobles into the abbey to be crowned. The catastrophe turned out well neither for the castle nor for its English defenders; for when it occurred, the queen, Mary of Gueldres, held up her boy of seven in view of the troops, and the assault was resumed with such fury that Lord Falconburg had to capitulate. The castle had often been taken by the English, and now, in the exasperation of the Scots at the loss of their king, it was torn stone from stone. Even then it was not to avoid further associations of the same hateful kind, for after the battle of Pinkie in 1547, when the Scots had to smart for their triumph at Ancrum two years before, theProtector Somerset formed a camp among the ruins, and compelled the neighbouring country to come in and pay tribute and “take assurance.” It was in carrying out his mission of exacting submission from the recalcitrant that honest Stawarth Bolton visited the mourning Elspeth Brydone at Glendearg, and thought to console her for the loss of her husband by offering himself as his successor. The ancient town which grew up in the shadow of the castle has been literally annihilated; the present village of Roxburghe is a little further eastwards. Floors (Fleurs) Castle, the princely seat of the Duke of Roxburghe, stands on the north bank of the stream, fronted by a spacious lawn. It was built by Vanbrugh, but was transformed to something approximating the Tudor type by Playfair, the Edinburgh architect. Judged by Vanbrugh’s achievements elsewhere, the change was most likely an improvement; but the effect has been to give the fabric a composite look which does not appreciate its other attractions—its superb situation, its magnificent proportions, its undeniable air of distinction.
DRYBURGH ABBEY, FROM THE EAST.DRYBURGH ABBEY, FROM THE EAST.
DRYBURGH ABBEY, FROM THE EAST.
Something must, in passing, be said of the Teviot, so full of history, of legend, of folk-song, and of romance, and endowed with such various and abundant beauty. Its most romantic association is with Branxholm Hall, cradle of the House of Buccleuch—the “Branksome Hall” where the “nine-and-twenty knights of fame” hung their shields; now a comely family residence, with the ancient tower for nucleus, standing on a steep bank north of the stream, about three miles from Hawick, the town where Sir Alexander Ramsay was captured by the Knight of Liddesdale, to becruelly starved to death in the dungeon of Hermitage Castle. Denholm, birthplace of Leyden, with Ruberslaw, and many another spot, must be passed over. But at Ancrum Moor we must give ourselves pause for a little, for here in 1545 the Scots “took amends” on the most ruthless and destructive raiders who ever crossed the Tweed. In 1544 Sir Ralph Evers, Governor of Berwick, with Sir Brian Latoun, had made an incursion in the course of which, according to Evers’ own inventory, the “towns, towers, barnekynes, parysche churches, bastill houses” which they “burned and destroyed” amounted to 192; while of cattle they had “lifted” 10,386, of “shepe” 12,492, and of nags and geldings 1,296—and these are only some of the details. For these achievements a grateful monarch made Evers a lord of Parliament, and he was celebrated in song as one who, having “burned the Merse and Teviotdale,” still was ready “to prick the Scot.” The praise was well deserved, for the next year he and Sir Brian made another raid, and beat their record. Returning towards Jedburgh, laden with booty, they were followed by Angus and by Norman Leslie, and while they were halting on Ancrum Moor, Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch came up with a body of retainers. He had a long account to settle. The outworks of his Castle of Branxholm had been burned; all his lands in West Teviotdale and on Kale Water had been harried; and the Moss Tower, near the junction of Kale with Teviot, had been made “to smoke sore.” By his counsel Angus took up a position on the piece of low ground called Peniel Heugh, and having drawn the invaders into ambush, an easy victory was won. Evers and Latoun both fell, and a thousand prisoners were made. The scene of the battle is also known as Lilliard’s Edge, from the “fair maiden Lillyard,” who took part in the fight, and “when her legs were cutted off” by the English louns, “fought upon her stumps.” The column on the hill, visible for miles along the valley of the Tweed, as well as in Teviotdale, has nothing to do with this lady’s heroism, or with the Scottish victory, but, as the peasantry are surprised to be told, commemorates the Battle of Waterloo.
RUINS OF ROXBURGHE CASTLE.RUINS OF ROXBURGHE CASTLE.
RUINS OF ROXBURGHE CASTLE.
Another place on the Teviot, Carlenrig, not far from the source, near the Dumfries border, is celebrated as the scene of Johnnie Armstrong’s execution in the course of James V.’s hanging and hunting expedition. His keep was at Hole House, in Eskdale; but at the head of thirty-six bravely attired horsemen he came to Teviotdale and presented himself to the king, expecting to be received with favour. When James ordered him and his merry men to instant execution, he is represented as making a variety of large offers for pardon—as that he would bring in by a certain day, either quick or dead, any English subject, were he duke, earl, or baron, whom the king might name. But, his terms being all rejected, he said proudly, “It is folly to seek grace at a graceless face.” So—
“John murdered was at Carlinrigg,And all his gallant cumpanie;But Scotland’s heart was ne’er sae waeTo see sae mony brave men die.”
“John murdered was at Carlinrigg,And all his gallant cumpanie;But Scotland’s heart was ne’er sae waeTo see sae mony brave men die.”
“John murdered was at Carlinrigg,
And all his gallant cumpanie;
But Scotland’s heart was ne’er sae wae
To see sae mony brave men die.”
Among the Teviot’s vassal-streams are the Ale, whose “foaming tide” William of Deloraine swam in his night ride to Melrose; and the brawling Jed, which gives its name to the royal burgh on its banks—famous for “Jethart staves,” a species of battle-axe, and for “Jethart justice,” the equivalent of “Lydford law” in the West of England. One of those who came into the hangman’s hands at Jedburgh was Rattling Roaring Willie, the jovial harper at whose feet the “last minstrel” sat, with such excellent results. He could not brook that the tongue of the scoffer—
“Should tax his minstrelsy with wrong,Or call his song untrue:For this, when they the goblet plied,And such rude taunt had chafed his pride,The bard of Reull he slew.On Teviot’s side in fight they stood,And tuneful hands were stained with blood,”
“Should tax his minstrelsy with wrong,Or call his song untrue:For this, when they the goblet plied,And such rude taunt had chafed his pride,The bard of Reull he slew.On Teviot’s side in fight they stood,And tuneful hands were stained with blood,”
“Should tax his minstrelsy with wrong,
Or call his song untrue:
For this, when they the goblet plied,
And such rude taunt had chafed his pride,
The bard of Reull he slew.
On Teviot’s side in fight they stood,
And tuneful hands were stained with blood,”
and so forth. But the minstrel’s memory had etherealised the facts. The squalid prose of the story is that a drunken brawl arose at Newmill, on the Teviot, between Willie and a rival from Rule Water, known as Sweet Milk; that they fought it out there and then; and that Sweet Milk was slain on the spot.
Above Kelso—to return, with apologies, to the Tweed—the valley opens out, and the trees grow thicker, while the larch and the fir begin to come more into evidence. At Mertoun House, Lord Polwarth’s seat, environed with groves, one of those Introductions to the cantos of “Marmion” which so hamper the movement of the poem, while they contain some of the poet’s finest lines, is dated. Sir Walter was passing Christmas here, and even then, when the boughs were all leafless, “Mertoun’s halls” were fair. In another of the Introductions much that is interesting in a biographical sense is said about the large gabled tower which, as it stands four-square to all the winds that blow, is one of the most prominent objects in the landscape for miles along the valley. It is the SmailholmTower of the mystical “Eve of St. John,” and is built among a cluster of crags a few miles north of the stream, in the parish which contains Sandyknowe, a farmhouse leased by Sir Walter’s paternal grandfather from Scott of Harden. Thus it happened that from his third to his eighth year young Walter was often sojourning in the parish of Smailholm; and long afterwards, as the shattered tower and crags amid which the “lonely infant” had strayed and mused until the fire burned, rose up before him in vision, he confessed the poetic impulse which came to him in this “barren scene and wild.” The tower, anciently the property of the Pringles of Whytbank, now of Lord Polwarth, is a typical Border peel—not a castle, but simply a large square keep of enormous strength, the walls being nine feet thick; the chambers built over one another in three storeys, with communication by a narrow circular stair; the roof a platform; the whole enclosed by an outer wall. Much nearer the river, on the other side, is another Border strength, Littledean Tower, the keep of the Kers of Nenthorn; and close at hand stands the old shaft of the village cross, where in more stirring days than these, at the “jowing” of the bell, the men of the barony, armed with sword and lance, and sometimes with a “Jethart stave” (the Scots never took kindly to the twanging of the yew), would assemble in their hundreds to guard their own byres, or, mounted on their vigorouslittle ponies, to prick across the Border to empty their neighbours’, and belike to ruin them “stoop and roop.”
MELROSE ABBEY, FROM THE SOUTH-EAST.MELROSE ABBEY, FROM THE SOUTH-EAST.
MELROSE ABBEY, FROM THE SOUTH-EAST.
The huge three-coned hill which can be seen from below Kelso, and remains in sight for many miles, although it is constantly shifting from left to right, from front to rear, so mazy is the way of the stream, is, of course, the famous Eildon. Tradition says that it was split into three by the magician Scott, not Sir Walter of that ilk, but “the wondrous Michael,” more formally, Sir Michael Scott of Balwearie. Indeed, most of the more striking phenomena in these parts are ascribed to “Auld Michael” when they are not credited to “Auld Nickie” or Sir William Wallace. The theory is that he was under the constant necessity of finding employment for a spirit with an enormous appetite for work. On one occasion he bade him “bridle the Tweed with a curb of stone;” and the dam-head at Kelso, constructed in a single night, was the result. The division of Eildon into three was another night’s task; and it was not till he had set the industrious demon making ropes out of sea-sand that he himself could find any rest. If these incidents have a legendary look about them, it is certain that Sir Michael himself was no myth. He was profoundly versed in all the learning of the Dark Age; and it is probable that he was one of the ambassadors who sailed “to Noroway o’er the faem” to bring about the return of Alexander’s fair daughter. If he was less of a magician than his distant descendant, it was through no fault of his own. He was a diligent student of all the abstruse sciences, and wrote freely about them; and he was credited with uncanny attributes by the learned as well as by the vulgar of his day. While Sir Walter was in Italy he was complaining that the great Florentine had thought none but Italians worthy of being sent to hell. He was reminded that he of all men had no right to grumble, since his ancestor figures among the magicians and soothsayers of the “Inferno.”
MELROSE ABBEY: THE EAST WINDOW.MELROSE ABBEY: THE EAST WINDOW.
MELROSE ABBEY: THE EAST WINDOW.
However Eildon got its present shape, it forms a singularly picturesque object in the landscape. And the scene that lies rolled out before anyone who chooses to climb either of the summits is one of the fairest that mortal eye ever rested upon. To the south the view is bounded only by “Cheviot’s mountains lone;” to the north, by the Lammermoors; eastwards, the Tweedvalley, lustrous in its vesture of green of many shades, spreads itself out for miles beyond Dryburgh and St. Boswell’s, although the stream itself, from its way of hiding itself between deep and woody banks, is constantly vanishing from sight; westwards, beyond Abbotsford, to give variety to the view, the valley is less luxuriant, and the hills are larger, and instead of being divided into trim fields and meadows, or covered to their tops with bonny birks and hazels, present an unbroken surface of pasture-land, relieved only by patches of broom. To the south-west the outlying Ettricks keep ward over the valley where the shepherd-poet roamed and dreamed; full in view to the north-west, at the foot of the lovely Gala Water, is busy, brand-new Galashiels, blotting the blue with its smoke, and in other ways as well “sinning its gifts;” while nestling at the foot of the hill is Melrose, now a town rejoicing in “suburbs” and a hydropathic institution.
The glory of Dryburgh Abbey is its situation and immediate surroundings, in which it is certainly superior to Melrose, and even to Kelso. To get to it you leave the public highway, cross the water, and presently pace along a shady avenue, to find it at last bosomed in trees, seated on a grassy flat that slopes gently down to the river, whose music may be heard as its waves ripple by, almost insulating the site—for nowhere, perhaps, does the Tweed curl into so many loops as between Mertoun and Abbotsford. And Nature, not content with furnishing an incomparable situation and almost incomparable surroundings, has done her best with ivy and other creeping plants to hide the scars left by the hands of violent men. What now meets the eye is the western gable of the nave, a gable of the south transept, with a five-light window, and a bit of the choir and north transept—sufficient to show that the abbey was much smaller than either of its neighbours. The transept and choir are First, the nave—rebuilt in the first half of the fourteenth century—Second, Pointed, while the conventual buildings, south of the abbey, show the transition from Romanesque to Pointed. At Melrose there is not a vestige of the monastic buildings left; here they are in better preservation than the Abbey itself. The most perfect of them is the chapter-house, over against which are some immemorial yews. The founder was Hugh de Morville, Lord of Lauderdale and Constable of Scotland; the stone—an obdurate brownish sandstone—was hewn from the quarry on the Dryburgh estate which yielded its substance also for Melrose. Ravished and burnt by Edward II., the monastery was at once rebuilt, partly at the charges of Robert the Bruce. Then it was burnt by Richard II.; but it was not actually ruined until the devastating wars which broke out in the reigns of James IV. and V., when it was twice ravaged by Evers and Latoun, and once by the Earl of Hertford, who left it much as we now see it, save for the healing work of Nature and of Time. One feature of the ruins to which a peculiar interest attaches is the gloomy vault in which the “nun of Dryburgh” for years immured herself, never quitting it until dark, returning to it at midnight, and persisting in this strange mode of life until at last the night came which had no morrow, when they buried her in the adjoining graveyard. She never explainedherself, but the common belief was that she had vowed never to look upon the sun during the absence of her lover, who came not back, having fallen in the affair of ’45.
How it came to pass that the dust of “Waverley” lies in St. Mary’s aisle we know from Allan Cunningham. When Sir Walter was stricken down in 1819, and was believed to be at the point of death, the Earl of Buchan, the eleventh of his line, made a somewhat fussy though well-intended appeal to Lady Scott to prevail upon her husband to be buried here beside his forbears the Haliburtons of Newmains, to whom the abbey once belonged; and Sir Walter, without seeming greatly impressed, promised that the earl should have the refusal of his bones, since he seemed so solicitous. Things, however, did not shape themselves quite as the nobleman had anticipated. Sir Walter recovered, and the earl had for three years been sleeping with his ancestors in St. Moden’s Chapel before that sad September day when the writer whose nimble pen had traced its last word was borne here, and sorrowfully laid beside his wife, whom six years earlier he had followed to the same hallowed resting-place. In the chapel now lie his eldest son, Colonel Sir Walter Scott, and Lockhart, his “son-in-law, biographer, and friend.” The aisle, it should be added, contains the dust of other families of note, including the Haigs of Bemerside, who have flourished there ever since the days of Malcolm IV., and who form the subject of one of the barbarous couplets said to have been written by Thomas the Rhymer before—all too tardily—he was appropriated by the fairies.
The Earl of Buchan spoken of above had a weakness for setting up monuments, and in indulging it he showed more public spirit than good taste. Close by his suspension bridge he built “an Ionic temple” of red sandstone, with a statue of Apollo under the dome, and a bust of Thomson perched on the top. As time went on, the statue was so much damaged (it may be hoped that something higher than a spirit of destructiveness was the motive of the image-breaking) that it had to be removed, though the bust still holds its place. A furlong or two up the stream, on a thickly timbered eminence, facing the Border, he put up a colossal statue of Wallace, hewn out of the same incongruous material, but painted white, though the paint has long since vanished. Wallace suffered many things during his life, but it was not a Sassenach who did this.
Between Dryburgh and Melrose the Tweed is swollen by Leader’s “silver tide” from the Lammermoors. On the banks of this water St. Cuthbert tended his flocks in the days of his youth; while at Earlston—formerly Ercildoune—two miles above the confluence, lived Thomas the Rhymer, whose surname appears to have been Lermont or Learmount, and who is believed to have lived in a castle of which a tower is still shown. There is no doubt that Thomas had a real existence; but whether he posed as a prophet, and had commerce with the fairies, and was finally spirited away by a hart and hind that were seen calmly parading the village, is more questionable. The poet, however, isclear enough about it all. With much detail he tells how, when the message came to the Rhymer to follow the deer, he “soon his cloaths did on,” and—
“First he woxe pale and then woxe red,Never a word he spake but three:‘My sand is run; my thread is spun;This sign regardeth me.’”
“First he woxe pale and then woxe red,Never a word he spake but three:‘My sand is run; my thread is spun;This sign regardeth me.’”
“First he woxe pale and then woxe red,
Never a word he spake but three:
‘My sand is run; my thread is spun;
This sign regardeth me.’”
Then, having bidden farewell to the Leader, he crossed the flood and was seen no more of men.
ABBOTSFORD.ABBOTSFORD.
ABBOTSFORD.
With the situation of St. Mary’s Abbey Dorothy Wordsworth was fain to avow herself disappointed. When she came to Melrose she found it “almost surrounded by insignificant houses,” which is even truer now than it was then; and she adds that even when viewed from a distance the position did not seem happy, for the church was not close to the river, “so that you do not look upon them as companions to each other.” This has been rebuked as “somewhat captious;” but one presumes to think it nothing of the kind. In itself, however, the Abbey is fair beyond description; it would be as difficult to adversely criticise as it is to adequately praise it. To justly appreciate its proportions, graceful and imposing even in its ruin, and with the central tower bereft of its rood-spire, it should be seen from one of the summits of Eildon; yet its details, when minutely scrutinised on the spot, are still more admirable. Burns, before his timein his appreciation of Gothic architecture as in some other things, speaks of it as “a glorious ruin;” to Sir Walter’s mind it was “the finest specimen of Gothic architecture and Gothic sculpture which Scotland can boast.” It is, in sooth, one of the crowning achievements of the Gothic, with most of its merits and almost none of its faults. Exuberantly ornamented, it never oversteps the thin line which separates richness from redundancy. Even the great east window, built after Richard II.’s devastations in 1385, when the Gothic had passed its prime, has a grace and harmony which justify all the admiration usually accorded to its size; while it is preserved from the stiffness which is the besetting sin of the Perpendicular by the foliaged tracery that knits the long mullions together. The window in the south transept, also in five lights, is, however, to be preferred before it, although considerably smaller; it is in the Second Pointed, or Decorated style, to which the greater part of the ruin belongs, and the lines into which its mullions flow are of indescribable loveliness. The carving on capital and corbel, on boss and buttress, has an elaborate yet dainty beauty such as is seldom met with on either side of the Tweed, and must of a truth be the work of hands that were made cunning by love of art and patient by a sense of pious duty.
The first Abbey of Melrose, built of oak and thatched with reeds, occupied a nearly insulated site two miles down the river, where the village of Old Melrose now stands. It was a “Chaldee” foundation, as Mrs. Dods would say—was founded by Aidan of Lindisfarne, was the home of the St. Boisil after whom St. Boswell’s is named, as well as of St. Cuthbert, was destroyed by Kenneth, after an existence of three hundred years, and, though rebuilt, sank into decay and ruin. Then, five hundred years after St. Aidan, came St. David, who, when the new monastery had been built, brought Cistercian monks from Rievaulx to fill it. Its experiences at the hands of the second Edward and the second Richard, of Evers and Latoun, and of Hertford, were identical with those of Dryburgh, and the dismal story need not be repeated. After the Reformation a part of the nave was used as the parish church, a barbarous wall of brick being put up at the west end, rising into an equally sightly vault to keep out the weather. Although these additions are a grievous eyesore, it was rightly decided, when early in the present century a church was built, to let them be, lest their removal should leave the ruins less secure. In 1832 these were repaired, and the circumstance that the Duke of Buccleuch allowed Sir Walter Scott to superintend the work is guarantee that it was done with a tender and reverent hand. The bell which counted the slow hours for the drowsy monks still tells the time, with quite as much accuracy as could be expected or desired.
To the cloisters access is had by a low door at the north-east end of the nave—the entrance through which William of Deloraine was led to the wizard’s grave. One of the tombs bears an incongruous printed label, “Michael Scott;” but the identification rests on evidence which would not even satisfy an antiquary—onnothing else, in truth, than the story of the “last minstrel,” who was not scrupulous as to matters of fact. Nor is there anything but tradition to show that the magician was buried in the Abbey at all. In this instance, moreover, tradition is divided against itself, for one story has it that he was interred in the monastery founded by St. Waltheof at Holme Coltrame, in Cumberland. In one particular, however, the stories agree: they both aver that the magic books were buried with the wizard, or preserved in the monastery where he died; and here we have the hint of which Sir Walter has made such splendid use in the “Lay.” There has been much controversy, by the way, over the question whether the ruins were ever explored by Scott by moonlight. Old John Bower, who for many years was the keeper of the abbey, maintained that he could never have done so, since he had never borrowed the key from him at night; and a verse has been quoted from Sir Walter himself against those who find it hard to believe that the sweetest lines in the “Lay” were not written from “personal experience”:—
“Then go and muse with deepest aweOn what the writer never saw,Who would not wander ’neath the moonTo see what he could see at noon.”
“Then go and muse with deepest aweOn what the writer never saw,Who would not wander ’neath the moonTo see what he could see at noon.”
“Then go and muse with deepest awe
On what the writer never saw,
Who would not wander ’neath the moon
To see what he could see at noon.”
The lines are not characteristic, and probably are not genuine. But whether Scott was “too practical a man to go poking about the ruins by moonlight,” as Tom Moore contended, or was not, is surely a trivial and even irrelevant question. If Scott never saw the Abbey except when it was being flouted by “the gay beams of lightsome day,” it does not follow that the passage is mere moonshine. Peradventure it is poetry.
Other doubtful interments here, besides that of the magician, are those of Alexander II. and his queen Joanna. But probably the Abbey does contain the heart of the great Bruce, believed to have been deposited here, in fulfilment of the king’s written wish, after Douglas’s unsuccessful attempt to bear it to the Holy Land. Nor is it open to doubt that some of the Douglases themselves came here to rest after their stormful lives. The doughty earl who was slain at Otterburn was not “buried at the braken bush,” as says the ballad, but beneath the high altar of this Abbey. Hither also was borne Sir William Douglas, the so-called Flower of Chivalry, when Ramsay’s murder had been inadequately avenged on Williamhope, betwixt Tweed and Yarrow, by Sir William’s godson and chieftain, William Earl of Douglas. It was the wanton defacing of these tombs that nerved the arm of Angus at Ancrum Moor; and when one remembers the scathe wrought upon and within these walls by Lord Evers, it seems to be of the very essence of irony that this should be his place of sepulture. Yet it was not in scorn that he was interred amid the evidences of his destructiveness, but as a mark of honour to a brave albeit pitiless foe.
In the churchyard, under the fifth window of the nave, is the tomb of a modern worthy, Sir David Brewster, who lived at Allerly, near Gattonside, anddied in 1868. Elsewhere is the grave of faithful Tom Purdie, marked by a monument raised by Scott himself, from whose pen proceeded the inscription. “In grateful remembrance,” runs this model epitaph, “of his faithful and attached service of twenty-two years, and in sorrow for the loss of a humble but sincere friend.” Poor Tom! he could not have gone about with a prepossessing aspect if he sat for Cristal Nixon in “Redgauntlet.” Yet when he was brought before Sir Walter on a charge of poaching, and with mingled pathos and humour set forth his hardships and temptations—a wife and children dependent upon him, work scarce, and grouse abundant—the Sheriff’s heart was touched; so Tom, instead of being haled off to prison, was taken on as shepherd, and afterwards made bailiff. Sir Walter was not infallible. He was grossly imposed upon by the Flemish guide at Waterloo. But perhaps no one ever lived who better understood the Lowland peasant; and in this instance he had no reason to question his insight. Purdie identified himself with all Scott’s concerns, talked of “our trees” as the plantation at Abbotsford proceeded, and of “our buiks” as the novels came out, and never ceased to amuse his generous master with his quaint humour, or to gratify him by his efficient service.
A little above the centre of the town the stream is crossed by a suspension foot-bridge, which connects Melrose with Gattonside, granted to the Abbey by its founder, and still celebrated for its orchards. The footpath which follows the windings of the river, with wooded slopes on either hand, leads past Skirmish Hill, at Darnick, the scene of the “Battle of Melrose,” one of many consequences of the disaster at Flodden, which left the realm with a king in long clothes. The gallant attempt made at the king’s own suggestion, and in his presence, by Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch, to cut the leading-strings in which the Douglases insisted upon keeping the high-spirited monarch, was frustrated by the inopportune return of the lairds of Cessford and Fairnyhurst, and Buccleuch and his men had to flee for their lives.
In the neighbourhood of the picturesque bridge which carries the Galashiels road across the river, and gives the passing traveller a glimpse both up and down stream which must make him hunger for more, is the site of the curious old drawbridge, if so it may be called, which belonged to the Pringles of Galashiels, afterwards of Whytbank, and consisted of three octangular towers or pillars, from the centre one of which the ward would, for a consideration, lay out planks, and so extemporise an elevated footway. It was this service which Peter refused to do for the sacristan of Kennaquhair when the holy man was bearing to the monastery the Lady of Avenel’s heretical book. “Riding the water” on a moonlit night, he thought, would do the monk no harm; and so, though a “heavy water” was running, Father Philip had to ford the stream, with results so discomforting and mysterious. It was not only with Peter and his laird that the monks of St. Mary’s had disputes. Even when the monastery was founded they were not quite unsusceptible to sports dear to the profane, for in the charter which gave them rightsof forestry it was thought necessary to except hunting and the taking of falcons. As they waxed sleek they did not grow less selfish, or less tenacious of their rights; and so there was much contention between them and their neighbours, whose opinion about them sometimes found vent in catches of poetry. The men of God do not appear to have retaliated in verse. But there was the pulpit, and there were penances.
Betwixt this point and Abbotsford the Alwyn and Gala Waters flow in—the one babbling down a glen which is in parts prettily wooded, and is recognised as the Glendearg where the Lady of Avenel spent the sad years of her widowhood; the other reeking with the chemical abominations of Galashiels. As the ascent is continued, the valley grows somewhat less rich in beauty, nor is it improved by the flaring red houses which look down upon Abbotsford from the slopes on the opposite bank. When Sir Walter acquired the estate—or, rather, the first bit of it—it must have been much less attractive than now. It was then a farm, a hundred acres in extent, and there was hardly a tree upon it. He was his own architect; and it was one of his boasts that there was not one of the trees which had not been planted under his direction. The house for which he is thus to be held responsible is scarcely imposing, nor can it be said to have the merit of consistency. You can see at a glance that it grew, rather than was made. On the whole, it is pleasing to the eye rather than to the architectural sense; and if, as has been said, its gables and sections and windows and turrets and towers are a little bewildering in their multitude and variety, one still ventures to think that it is better as it is, plentiful as may be its lack of plan, than it would be if it conformed more strictly to the conventional castellated type.
The interests of Abbotsford are many and great. It is indeed “a romance in stone and lime,” every outline, as Lockhart says, with little exaggeration, “copied from some old baronial edifice in Scotland, every roof and window blazoned with clan bearings, or the lion rampant gules, or the heads of the ancient Stuart kings.” And Sir Walter was from his earliest years a diligent gleaner of curiosities; so that, apart from many precious mementoes of himself, the rooms which the Hon. Mrs. Constable Maxwell Scott, his great-grand-daughter, throws open to the public, form a museum of the rarest interest. But, after all, it is chiefly the desire to make acquaintance with the scenes amid which the sanest and shrewdest of our great writers since Shakespeare spent the most eventful years of his blameless life that draws to Abbotsford its crowds of pilgrims. It was here that he wrote most of his works; here that he met the great disaster of his life in a spirit which showed in combination the loftiest chivalry and the nicest commercial integrity; here that he piously submitted himself to the stroke of death. The story of his return to Abbotsford to die is full of pathos. “As we rounded the hill at Ladhope, and the outline of the Eildons burst on him,” says his biographer, “he became greatly excited; and when ... his eye caught at length his own towers ... he sprang up with a cry of delight.” Then theybore him into the dining-room, and his dogs “began to fawn upon him and lick his hands, and he alternately sobbed and smiled over them until sleep oppressed him.” The next day he felt better, he said, and might disappoint the doctors after all. But his strength continued to leave him, and he was often delirious and unconscious. One day, about two months after his return, he sent for his son-in-law, who found him with eye “clear and calm,” though in the last extreme of feebleness. “Lockhart,” he said, “I may have but a minute to speak to you. My dear, be a good man—be virtuous, be religious—be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here.” These were almost his last words. Four days afterwards he breathed his last, in the presence of all his children. “It was a beautiful day—so warm that every window was open, and so perfectly still that the sound of all others most delicious to his ear, the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles, was distinctly audible as we knelt around the bed, and his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes.” Surely this man died “in the odour of sanctity” as truly as Waltheof of Melrose or any tonsured saint of them all.