MORAY HOUSE.MORAY HOUSE.
But there is still splendour and power, bequeathed as Taylor said, "from antiquitie to posteritie," in spite of the decline and the decay. If the palace of Mary of Lorraine on Castle Hill is fallen and the doorways are in the Museum—Mary who was mother to Mary Queen, and contemporary worthy to Catherine of Medici—there are still, at the end of the long street, Moray House and Queensberry House. Moray is where Cromwell lodged in 1648, and gave no hint of what was coming in 1649; if he had, history might have been different; to-day Moray House is the United Free Church Training college! Queensberry House is where lived those Queensberry marquises of fighting and sporting renown, and where the Marquis livedwho forced through the Act of Union—"There ended an old song"; and now it is the Refuge for the Destitute!
There is still beauty shining through the dust and the cobwebs; here a doorway with bold insignia and exquisite carving, leading to—nowhere; here a bit of painting, Norrie's perhaps, or a remnant of timbered ceiling; and everywhere, now as then—more now than then, since sanitary destruction has had its way here and there—glimpses of the city and the moors and the mountains.
It is invidious to compare, to choose from these closes. Each has its history, its old habitations, its old associations, its particular picturesqueness; Lady Stair's, Baxter's, Byer's, Old Stamp Office, White Horse, and many more.
Through this street what glory that was Scotland has not passed and what degradation, what power has not been displayed and what abasement? To see it now, filled with people and with marching troops in honour of the visiting king, is to get back a little of ancient history, of greater glory. It lends itself to such majesty, dull and deserted as it is for the most part.
When the King came to Edinburgh followingon his coronation, making a pilgrimage of his realm, he came to St. Giles, as has come every sovereign of Scotland, from Malcolm who may have worshiped in the Culdee church, to George in whose honour the chapel of the Thistle and the Rose was unveiled.
"For noo, unfaithfu' to the LordAuld Scotland joins the rebel horde;Her human hymn-books on the boardShe noo displays,An' Embro Hie Kirk's been restoredIn popish ways."
INTERIOR OF ST. GILES.INTERIOR OF ST. GILES.
On a Sunday morning I hurried to St. Giles to see the trooping of the colours. (Later, listening to Dr. White, in a recently built reformed church on Princes Street, I heard a sermon from the text, "You shall see the king in all his beauty." But, no mention of King George! It was even as it was in the old days.)
In truth it was a brave sight to find the High Street thronged with people, and the regiments marching down from St. Giles to Holyrood. The king did not enter town till next day. (I saw, with some resentment, over the door of a public house, the motto, "Will ye no come back again?") But, somehow, so many kings gone on, the play was rather better staged with the sovereign not there. I learned then howgorgeous the old days must have been with their colour and glitter and flash.
I suppose there was a talllandwhere in my day stood and still stands Hogg's hotel, just above the Tron Kirk; thelandson the south side the High burned a century ago. But, to the American gazing down on ancient memories and present sovereignties, there was a wonderful courtesy shown by the hotel. I had interrupted their quiet Sabbath; it can still be quiet in Edinburgh notwithstanding that a tram car carried me on my way hither. The dining-room of this hotel looked out on the High, and it was breakfast time for these covenanting-looking guests from the countryside. But I, an invader, was made welcome and given the best seat on the balcony; a stranger and they took me in. Sometime I shall take up residence in this Latin Quarter, and if not in Lady Stair's Close, then in Hogg's hotel. The name sounds sweeter if you have just come up from Ettrick.
Nor did I miss the King. For
"I saw pale kings, and princes too,Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;Who cry'd—'La Belle Dame sans merciHath thee in thrall!'"
It was the Belle Dame, it was the Queen, I saw most often on the High Street, riding toand fro from the time of the "haar" on her return from France, till that last terrible night and the ride to Loch Leven.
JOHN KNOX'S HOUSE.JOHN KNOX'S HOUSE.
After that you may visit the John Knox house if you will, and read for your edification its motto. "Lyfe God aboune al and yi nicht-bour as yi Self," and buy a book or two in its book shop. I took particular pleasure in buying a girlish picture of Mary Queen, and a book of the poems of Robert Fergusson, neither of which would have pleasured John.
After that you may look at the "I. K." in the pavement, and realize that Dr. Johnson's wish for Knox has been fulfilled—"I hope in the highway."
After that you may look on the heart stamped in the pavement near St. Giles, where once stood the Heart of Midlothian, the Old Tolbooth.
There is only one other memory of High Street and of Scotland that for me equals that of Mary. It is Montrose. Up the Canongate comes the rumbling of a tumbril, like the French Revolution. And out of the highlandsthere look the hundreds of Covenanting folk, triumphant for the moment. And on the balcony of Moray House, within which the marriage of Lady Mary Stewart to the Marquisof Lorne has just been celebrated, there stands the wedding party, and among them the Earl of Argyle. Up the street comes the cart. And within it clad like a bridegroom—"fyne scarlet coat to his knee, trimmed with silver galoons, lined with taffeta, roses in his shoon, and stockings of incarnet silk"—stands the Marquis of Montrose, the loyalest Scotsman that ever lived.
After the field of Kylsyth, after the field of Philipshaugh, and the flight to the North and the betrayal, he has been brought back to Edinburgh, to a swift and covenanting sentence, and to death at the Tron.
His eyes meet proudly those of Argyle who has deserted his king and who thinks to stand in with the Covenant and with the future. It is the eyes of Argyle which drop. And Montrose goes on.
His head is on the picket of the Netherbow Port. His four quarters are sent to the four corners of the kingdom, Glasgow, Perth, Aberdeen, Inverness.
But the end is not yet. The tables turn, as they turned so often in those unstable times. It is Argyle who goes to the scaffold. Charles is king, the Second Charles. There is an edict. The body of Montrose is dug up out of theBoroughmoor. It is buried in Holyrood. The four quarters are reassembled from Glasgow and Perth and Aberdeen and Inverness. A procession fairly royal moves from Holyrood to St. Giles. At the Netherbow it pauses. The head is taken down from the pike. The body of Montrose is whole again. An honourable burial takes place in the cathedral sanctuary.
JAMES GRAHAM, MARQUIS OF MONTROSE.JAMES GRAHAM, MARQUIS OF MONTROSE.
Even though when search was made at the restoring of the church and the erection of the effigy the remains could not be found, there has been that justification by procession and by faith, that justification of loyalty that we remember when we remember Montrose—
"He either fears his fate too much,Or his deserts are small,That dares not put it to the touch,To gain or lose it all."
Holyrood, ruined as it is, empty as it is, spurious as it is, still can house the Stewarts. Nowhere else are they so completely and splendidly Stewart. It is the royalest race which ever played at being sovereign; in sharp contrast with the heavier, more successful Tudors;crafty but less crafty than the Medici; amorous but more loyal than the Bourbons.
Never did kings claim sovereignty through a more divine right—and only one (whisper sometimes intimates that he was not Stewart, but substitute; but he left a Stewart descent) failed to pay the penalty for such assertion. It was the splendour which was Stewart while they lived, the tragedy that was Stewart when they came to die, which makes them the royal race.
There were born in Holyrood not one of them, unless it be James V. But almost all of them were married in Holyrood, held here their festive days, and, not one of them died in Holyrood. It is their life, the vivid intense flash of it, across those times that seem mysterious, even legendary in remembered times north of the Border. Life was a holiday to each of the Stewarts, and he spent it in the palace and in the pleasance of Holyrood.
The Abbey, with the monastery which was attached to it, begins far back before the Stewarts. It was founded by David I, the abbey-builder. Legend has it that he went a-hunting on a holy day, and straying from the "noys and dyn of Bugillis," a white stag came against him. David thought to defend himself, but a hand bearing a cross came out of the cloud, andthe stag was exorcised. David kept the cross. In dream that night within the castle he was commanded to build an abbey where he had been saved, and the hunting place being this scant mile and a quarter from the castle—then a forest where now it is treeless—David placed this convenient abbey where it has stood for six centuries, defying fire and war and reformation, until the citizens of Edinburgh ravaged it when the roof fell in in the middle of the eighteenth century.
There is a curious feeling when one crosses the Girth stones at the lower end of the Canongate. It is a century and more since this was sanctuary. But it is impossible to step across these stones, into the "Liberty of Holyrood," and not wonder if there may not perhaps be some need in your own soul of sanctuary. Thousands and thousands of men—"abbey lairds" as they were pleasantly called—have stepped across this line before me, through the centuries. Who am I to be different, unneedful? May I not need inviolate sanctuary? May it not be that at my heels dogs some sinister creditor who will seize me by the skirts before I reach the boundary beyond which there is no exacting for debt? A marvelous thing, this ancient idea of sanctuary. It made an oasisof safety in a savage world. Surely it was super-christian. And here, at Holyrood, as the medieval statute declares, "qukilk privelege has bene inviolabie observit to all maner of personis cuman wythin the boundes ... past memorie of man." What has the modern world given itself in place of ancient sanctuary? Justice, I suppose, and a jury trial.
HOLYROOD PALACE.HOLYROOD PALACE.
But, once across the Girth, one becomes, not a sanctuarian, but a Stewart.
The situation is a little dreary, a little flat. And the palace, as a palace, is altogether uninteresting to look on. It is not the building of David or of the earlier Stewarts. But of that Merry Monarch who harboured so long in France, when England was determining whether it would be royal or republican, and Scotland was determining whether it would be covenanted or uncovenanted. The Merry Monarch was ever an uncovenanted person, not at all Scottish, although somewhat like the errant James—whose errancy was of his own choosing. Charles had acquired a French taste at the court of his cousin, Louis the Grand. So the new Holyrood was built in French baronial style. And no monarch has ever cared to inhabit it for any length of time. Only King Edward VII, who would have been a happy successor to James, but Edward was very studious in those days of 1859, when he lodged here and studied under the direction of the Rector of the Royal High School. Still I can but think that it was in this Stewart place that Edward developed his Stewartship.
There is not a stone to speak of the magnificence, of the strength, of David. The Abbey was burned and burned again, by Edward and Richard the Second, and entirely rebuilt when the Stewarts were beginning to be splendid and assured. Over the west doorway, high-arched and deep-recessed, early English in its technique, Charles I, who was crowned here in 1633, caused the stone to be placed.
"He shall build ane House for my name and I will stablish the throne of his kingdom forever."
"He shall build ane House for my name and I will stablish the throne of his kingdom forever."
The tablet still stands above the doorway. But Charles is lying for his sins in a vault at St. George's chapel at Windsor far in the south, having paid his penalty on the scaffold in Whitehall. And the House is in ruins, "bare ruined choir," where not even "the late birds sing." Although Mendelssohn in speaking of the impression the Abbey made on him, does say, "I think I found there the beginnings of my Scotch symphony."
This "magnificent Abbey-Kirk of Halirude"was no doubt very splendid; although in architectural beauty it cannot compare with Melrose, not even the great east window with its rich quatrefoil tracing. But what scenes have been staged in that historic drama, that theatrical piece, we call the history of the Stewarts!
Before the high altar, under that east window, when James I was kneeling before God in prayer, there appeared the Lord of the Isles, come repentant from burning Inverness and other rebellion, to kneel before the king, his own sword pointed at his breast.
Before this altar James II was married to Mary of Gueldres. James III was married to Margaret of Denmark, who brought the Orkneys as her dower. James IV was married to Margaret Tudor, the union of the "Thistle and the Rose." James V was not married here, he went to France for his frail bride, Magdalene, who lived but seven weeks in this inhospitable land, this hospitable Holyrood. She was buried in Holyrood chapel, only to be dug up and tossed about as common clay when the Edinburgh citizens made football of royal skulls.
The two sons of James VI, Henry who should have been king and who might have united royalist and commoner had fate granted it, and Charles who was to become king, wereboth christened here. James VII, brother to Charles II, restored this Chapel Royal and prepared it for the Roman ritual. James VIII was never here, or but as a baby. Charles III—did the Bonnie Prince in that brief brilliant Edinburgh moment of his, ever kneel before this then deserted altar and ask divine favour while he reasserted the divine right of kings?
Here—or was it secretly, in Stirling?—the Queen—one says The Queen and all the world knows—gowned in black velvet, at five o'clock on a July morning, was married to her young cousin, Henry Darnley. A marriage that endured two long terrible tumultuous years.
Here—or was it in the drawing-room?—at two o'clock on a May morning, the Queen was married to Bothwell, by Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney, not with mass as she had been wed to her boy-cousin, but with preaching as she wed the Bishop's cousin. And "at this marriage there was neither pleasure nor pastime used as use was wont to be used when princes were married." So says the Diurnal Occurents of Scotland. A marriage that endured a brief, perhaps happy, tragedy-gathering month.
And the Queen beautiful was destroyed, by the Reformation, like an Abbey.
The bones of Darnley were ravaged by thecitizens of Edinburgh out of the ruins of this chapel. Or were they carried to Westminster by that unroyal son who was so laggard in caring for the remains of his queenly mother? I hope that Darnley does not rest beside her. For I think those exquisite marble fingers of the effigy in Henry VII's chapel, looking I fain believe as those of Mary looked, tapering, lovely, sinister, would not so fold themselves in prayer without unfolding through the long centuries.
JAMES IV.JAMES IV.
In the old palace the most glorious days were those when James IV was king. As the most glorious days of Scotland were those which are almost legendary. The palace still had the grandeur that was Norman and the grace that was early English under David. Its front, towered and pinnacled, suggesting more fortress security than this dull château, opened upon a great outer court that lay between the palace and the walls. Coming down the Canongate from the castle it must have looked very splendid to James. And yet he did not care to remain in it long. All the Stewarts had errant souls, and they loved to wander their kingdom through. It presented ample opportunity for adventure; scarce a Stewart ever left Scotland. That last Prince, who flashed across Scotland in one last Stewart sword thrust—"My friends," he said in Holyrood the night before Prestonpans, "I have thrown away the scabbard"—was but treading in the steps of his royal forebears, the royal fore-errants.
In the days of James IV—we say it as one should say in the days of Haroun al Raschid, and indeed Edinburgh was in those early years of the Fifteen Hundreds the Bagdad of the world, and her days as well as her nights were truly Arabian—the world must have looked much as it does on the pleasant morning when we make our royal entry into Holyrood.
The Abbey grounds, a regal area then, and still a regality, were rich with woodland and orchard, and terraced and flowered into southern beauty. The red crags of the Salisbury ridge rose bold above as they do to-day, and crowning the scene the leonine form of Arthur's Seat above the green slopes, the lion keeping guard against the invading lion of England! I think James must often have climbed to that height to look forth over his domain, over his city, to watch the world, as King Arthur—whom he did not resemble—did legendary centuries before.
It was a busy time in Edinburgh; men's hands and wits were working. In Leith, thenas now the port, then as now a separate burgh, there was much shipping and much building of ships; King James dreamed of a navy, and he had an admirable admiral in Sir Anthony Wood. In the castle there was the forging of guns, the "seven sisters of Brothwick," under direction of the king's master gunner, while Mons Meg looked on, and perhaps saw the near terrible future when these sisters of hers should be lost at Flodden.
In the city there was the splendid beginning of that intellectual life which has ever been quick in Edinburgh. It was a joyous time; witness the account from the lord High treasurer—
"On the 11th of February, 1488, we find the king bestowing nine pounds on gentil John, the English fule; on the 10th of June we have an item to English pipers who played to the king at the castle gate, of eight pounds eight shillings; on the thirty-first of August Patrick Johnson and his fellows, that playit a play to the king, in Lithgow, receives three pounds; Jacob the lutar, the king of bene, Swanky that brought balls to the king, twa wemen that sang to his highness, Witherspoon the foular, that told tales and brought fowls, Tom Pringill the trumpeter, twa fithelaris that sang Grey Steill to the king, the broken-bakkit fiddler of St.Andrew's, Quhissilgyllourie a female dancer, Willie Mercer who lap in the stank by the king's command."
Oh, a royal and democratic and merry time. It was Flodden that made men old, that tragic climax to this splendour.
"In the joyous moneth tyme of June," in the pleasant garden of the town-house of the great Earl of Angus, looking down on the still waters of the Nor' Loch, and across the woods and moors to the glittering blue Firth, there sat the pale stripling, Gavin Douglass, third son of Douglass, Archibald Bell-the-Cat, late in orders at Mony musk, but now come up to St. Giles as prior in spite of his youth, and more absorbed in poetry than men.
"More pleased that in a barbarous ageHe gave rude Scotland Virgil's page,Than that beneath his rule he heldThe bishopric of fair Dunkeld."
Here I would dispute Scott. After all, Dark Ages are not always as dark as they look to those who come after. And if the "Dark Ages" of Europe were brilliantly luminous in Moslem capitals, Bagdad and Cordova, so "rude Scotland" was more polished under James IV than England under Henry VII, or France under Louis XII.
As Gavin has recorded in "The Palice of Honour," he had interview with Venus in her proper limbo, and she had presented him with a copy of Virgil, bidding him translate it. And so, quite boldly, before any Englishman had ventured, and all through the winter, forgetful—except when he wrote his prefaces of
scharp soppis of sleit and of the snypand snaw
he had worked over his translation, from the Latin into the Scottish, and now it was nearly ready "to go to the printer," or more like, to be shown to the king. In sixteen months he had completed thirteen books; for he had added a book of Maphæus Vegius, without discrimination.
He was certain of the passagefacilis descensus Averni, for Gavin was Scotch, the time was Stewart. It ran in this wise—
"It is richt facill and eithgate, I tell theeFor to descend, and pass on down to hell,The black zettis of Pluto, and that dirk wayStand evir open and patent nicht and day.But therefore to return again on hichtAnd heire above recovir this airis lichtThat is difficul werk, thair labour lyis,Full few thair bene quhom hiech above the skyis,Thare ardent vertue has raisit and upheitOr zit quhame equale Jupiter deifyit,Thay quhilkie bene gendrit of goddes may thy oder attaneAll the mydway is wilderness unplaneOr wilsum forest; and the laithlie fludeCocytus, with his drery bosom unrudeFlows environ round about that place."
But he was not quite certain that he had been splendid enough, and daring enough, in his application of the royal lines—
"Hic Cæsar et omnis IuliProgenies, magnum caeli ventura sub axem."
So he had sent for his friend, William Dunbar, Kynges Makar, laureate to the sovereign. And Dunbar was never loath for a "Flyting," a scolding. He had them on every hand, with every one, and not only those he held with "gude maister Walter Kennedy," and published for the amusement of the King and his Court. It was a more solemn event when the future Bishop of Dunkeld summoned him. Though Gavin was fifteen years younger than William, he was more serious with much study, and under the shadow of future honours, and then, too, he was a Douglass.
So Dunbar came, striding up the Canongate between the tall inquisitive houses—even he found them "hampered in a honeycaim of their own making"—a very handsome figure, this Dunbar, in his red velvet robe richly fringed with fur, which he had yearly as his rewardfrom the King, and which I doubt not he preferred to the solemn Franciscan robe he had renounced when he entered the King's service.
James was away at Stirling. James was a poet also. Surely, on internal evidence, it is the Fourth James and not the Fifth, who wrote those charming, and improper poems, "The Gaberlunzieman" and "The Jolly Beggar."
"He took a horn frae his side, and blew baith loud and shrill,And four and twenty belted knights came skipping o'er the hill."And he took out his little knife, loot a' his duddies fa';And he was the brawest gentleman that was amang them a'."
"And we'll gang nae mair a roving,So late into the night;And we'll gang nae mair a roving, boys,Let the moon shine ne'er so bright."
Dunbar, official Makar, would fain secure the criticism of young Gavin on this joyous lament he had writ to the King in absence—
"We that here in Hevenis glory ...I mean we folk in ParadyisIn Edinburgh with all merriness."
And perhaps the young Gavin and the old Dunbar in their common fellowship of poetry, would drink a glass of red wine in memory offriends passed into death's dateless night—Timor Mortis conturbat me.
"He has Blind Harry and Sandy TraillSlaine with his schour of mortall haill....In Dunfermelyne he had done rovneWith Maister Robert Henrisoun."
And Dunbar, who was so much more human than Gavin, if older, would quote those immortal new lines of Henryson—
"Robene sat on gude grene hillKepand a flok of fe,Mirry Makyne said him till,Robene, thow pity on me."
While Gavin, so much elder than his looks, and mindful of Scottish as well as of Trojan history, would quote from Blind Harry in the name of Wallace—
"I grant, he said, part Inglismen I slewIn my quarrel, me thocht nocht halff enew.I mowyt na war but for to win our awin (own).To God and man the rycht full weill is knawin (known)."
Then Dunbar would wrap his rich red robe about him—I hope he wore it on ordinary days, or were there any when James the Fourth was king?—and stride back, through the Canongate to Holyrood, back to the court, where he would meet with young David Lindsay, of a differentsort from young Gavin Douglass. And they would chuckle over "Kitteis Confessioun," a dialogue between Kitty and the curate, which Lindsay had just written—and would not Dunbar be gracious and show it to the King?
Quod he, "Have ye na wrangous geir?"Quod scho, "I staw ane pek o' beir."Quod he, "That suld restorit be,Tharefore delyver it to me."Quod he, "Leve ye in lecherie?"Quod scho, "Will Leno mowit me."Quod he, "His wyfe that sall I tell,To mak hir acquentance with my-sell."Quod he, "Ken ye na heresie?""I wait nocht quhat that is," quod scho.Quod he, "Hard he na Inglis bukis?"Quod scho, "My maister on thame lukis."Quod he, "The bischop that sall knaw,For I am sworne that for to schaw."Quod he, "What said he of the King?"Quod scho, "Of gude he spak naething."Quod he; "His Grace of that sall wit,And he sall lose his lyfe for it."
Perhaps Warbeck was listening, Perkin Warbeck who pretended to be Duke of York, pretended to the English crown. So Scotland harboured him, and Holyrood was hospitable to him. James married him to Lady Jane Gordon, and for years, until he wearied of it, maintained a protectorate over this pinchbeck Pretender.
MARGARET TUDOR, QUEEN OF JAMES IV.MARGARET TUDOR, QUEEN OF JAMES IV.
I am certain that Dom Pedro de Ayala did not linger in the court to gossip with Dunbar, or with the hangers-on. Dom Pedro had come up from Spain on a strange ambassadorial errand, to offer to James in marriage a Spanish princess, knowing well that there might be no Spanish princess (Maria was betrothed to Portugal); but no doubt believing that there ought to be, since James was slow in marrying, and surely a Spanish princess would best mate this royalest of the Stewarts. Dom Pedro better liked the extravagant kingly court at Holyrood than the niggardly court at Windsor. He wrote home to Ferdinand and Isabella, "The kingdom is very old, and very noble, and the king possessed of great virtues, and no defects worth mentioning." No defects! Certainly not. James had the qualities of his defects, and these were royal. James could speak—not keep still—in eight languages, and could and did say "all his prayers." So Dom Pedro reports to his Most Catholic Majesty.
When he was thirty years old, this King Errant married, not the hypothetical daughter of Spain, but the substantial youthful Margaret Tudor, aged fourteen. The Scottish king would none of the alliance for years; James preferred hypothetical brides and errant affairs. Butthe English king saw the advantage and pressed it. He had united the roses, red and white, of England; he would fain join the thistle to the rose.
So James, in August, 1503, journeyed out to Dalkeith, whither Margaret had come. He returned to "hys bed at Edinborg varey well countent of so fayr a meetyng." A few days later, Margaret made her entry into Edinburgh, James having met her, gallantly dressed in "a jacket of crimson velvet bordered with cloth of gold." Leaving his restive charger, "mounting on the pallefroy of the Qwene, and the said Qwene behind hym, so rode throw the towne of Edinburgh." Their route lay through the Grassmarket up to the Castle Hill, and down the High Street and the Canongate, to the Abbey. Here they were received by the Archbishop of St. Andrews. Next day they were married by the Archbishop of Glasgow, the Archbishop of York joining in the solemn and magnificent celebration.
It is the most splendid moment in Edinburgh history, within the Abbey and the palace, and within the city. The Town Cross ran with wine, the highlandswere hung with banners and scarlet cloth, and morality plays were performed before the people. In the palace therewas a royal scene. And our friend, William Dunbar, Kynges Makar, read his allegory of "The Thrissl and the Roiss," which is still worth reading, if Chaucer is worth reading.
But, at night, in the royal apartment, the night before the wedding, perhaps in the fragment of the old palace which remains, the gallant king played to the little princess upon the virginal; and then, on bended knee and with unbonneted head, he listened while she played and sang to him. Out of the dark of the time it is a shining scene; and out of the splendour of the moment it brings a note of tenderness.
Another decade, another August, and the Boroughmoor (where now run the links of Burntland) was covered with the white of a thousand tents, Scotland was gathered for war, the "ruddy lion ramped in gold" floated war-like over all, and James and all Scotland prepared to march down to Flodden, heeding not the warning which had sounded at midnight in ghostly voice at the Town Cross; a warning no doubt arranged by Margaret, never a Stewart, always a Tudor. And—all Scotland was turned into a house of mourning.
Half a century later the history of Scotland came to a climax, and Mary Stewart came to Holyrood; that queen who then and ever sinceheld half the world in thrall, like another Iseult. The covenanted world has rejected her, as no doubt it would reject Iseult.
Shrouded in a gray "haar" from off the North Sea, rising like a Venus out of the mists of the sea, Mary Stewart, Dowager of France, Queen of Scotland, Heiress of England, came unto her own. And, her own received her, and, received her not.
The castle hanging high in air no longer hung there. The palace lying low on the plain was not there, on that August 19, 1561. There was nothing but what was near at hand; Mary could not see a hundred feet into her kingdom. In truth she arrived at port a week before the ship was expected—and Mary also flashed through her kingdom; witness the ride across the Marches to the Hermitage, and the ride through the North to punish Huntley. Hers was a restless soul, a restless body.
On her return to the kingdom she was accompanied by a great retinue, three of her French uncles of Guise and of Lorraine, her four Maries, and many ambassadors. It was a suspended moment in the world, the sixth decade of the sixteenth century. And nowhere were affairs in such delicate balance, or so like to swing out of balance as in Scotland; where religion, sovereignty, feudalism, morality, were swaying dizzily. So all the world sent their keenest ambassadors to observe, to foresee if possible, to report.
Yet Mary rode through the mists.
"Si grand brouillard," says the Sieur de Brantome, that gossipy chronicler, and Mary and her French courtiers and Scotch Maries, rode through the "haar," from Leith up whatever was the Leith Walk of that day to Holyrood.
The palace must have rung with French chatter, of these wondering and inquisitive and critical folk; for all the cultured world was French in those days, and Mary and her Maries had been only five or six when they left stormy Scotland for the pleasant smiling land of France.
Not for long was she permitted to believe she had brought France back with her and there was no reality in Scotland but as she made it. Reformation pressed in upon her, even through the windows of this turret where again she seems to listen to that prophetic and pious serenade, Scottish protestant psalms accompanied by fiddles and sung to a French Catholic queen. "Vile fiddles and rebecks," complains Brantome, hesitating to call vile the mobof five hundred gathered in the Scotch mists; but they sang "so ill and with such bad accord that there could be nothing worse. Ah, what music, and what a lullaby for the night!"
The rooms of Mary are still inclosed, the walls still stand about them, and a romantic care withholds the ravages of time from those tapestries and silken bed hangings, dark crimson damask, which Mary drew about her on that night of her return. And here hangs a picture of Queen Elizabeth, authentic, Tudoresque, which did not hang here when Mary returned; but what dark shadow of Elizabeth lurked behind these hangings! The very guard to whom you protest the picture understands—"I think it an insult to her memory."
It is here that Queen Mary still reigns. All the old palace was burned, carelessly, by Cromwell's soldiers, at what time men were caring nothing for palaces, and less for royalty. But, fate was royal, was Jacobite, and this gray turret of the northwest corner a building of James V on a foundation of James IV—perhaps where he had listened in the evening to Margaret and her virginal—was saved from the wrath of the Commonwealth. Within these very walls Mary played on the virginal, perhaps on the rebeck, and many sought to knowher stops—"you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me."
Here she was loved, as she still is loved. Here she made love, the mystery!—as always. Here she flashed those bright eyes on courtiers and commoners and straightway these fell into bondage—the Stewarts never drew the line of division. Here those eyes battled with John Knox as he met her in Dialogues, as John has faithfully recorded. And here those bright eyes filled with a storm of tears at his denunciation; but Knox felt their power. Here she met Darnley, in the chapel married him, and Knox called after dinner to declare that the Reformation did not approve. Here by the very stairs of the turret Darnley led the murderers on Rizzio, from his private apartments to hers. (I find it fit that Ker of Fawdonside, one of the murderers, should have married later the widow of Knox.) Mary was held here a prisoner; they would "cut her into collops and cast her over the wall" if she summoned help. But Mary could order that the blood stains of the fifty-six wounds of Rizzio should remain "ane memoriall to quychen her revenge." They quicken our thought of Mary to-day—if we accept them. From Holyrood Mary went to Kirk o' Field on a Sunday night in Februaryto visit Darnley who lay "full of the small pox." He had come back from Bothwell castle on Mary's urging; but he had gone to Bothwell to escape her revenge for Rizzio. She returned to Holyrood—"the Queen's grace gang and with licht torches up the Black Friar's Wynd"—where the wedding festivities of a member of her household were in progress. And, I doubt not, devoted to Mary as I am, that she was the merriest of the company.
Then the dark.
Bothwell CastleBothwell Castle
Then, at two in morning, an explosion that shook all Edinburgh, that astonished the world, that still reverberates through the world.
Then—the dark.
A marriage, at two in the morning, a flight to Borthwick, a meeting at Carberry, one more night in Edinburgh, in a house as mean as that of Kirk o' Field, a day at Holyrood, and a forced ride with ruffian nobles, Lindsay and Ruthven on each hand, to Loch Leven, thirty miles in the night of June 16, 1567—and Edinburgh and Holyrood and the Crown of Scotland know her no more.
"Helen's lips are drifting dust,Ilion is consumed in rust."
And Mary. And Holyrood.
There is one more Holyrood scene descending from this. On a Saturday evening, March 26, 1603, the son of Mary, the King of Scotland, supped with the Queen, perhaps in that small supper room where Rizzio was supping with a queen; and they had retired. "The palace lights were going out, one by one." And Sir Robert Carey, three days out from London, clattered into the courtyard, the King was roused, Sir Robert knelt before him—
"Queen Elizabeth is dead, and Your Majesty is King of England!"
James I of England, James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, son of Darnley, son of the ninth generation from Bruce, The Bruce. The "auld enemy" is finally defeated; and to borrow again from Rosaline Masson, "the lights of Holyrood went out, one by one."
In the long picture gallery of this dull modern palace, nothing of which either Mary or James ever saw, there hangs a series of portraits, one hundred pictures of Scottish kings, painted under order of Charles II in 1680, by the Fleming, DeWitt, who agreed to furnish the pictures in two years for one hundred and twenty pounds. They begin with Fergus I, 330B. C.They are the kings who passed before the prophetic vision of Banquo. Enough to frighten Macbeth!
One brief brilliant ghost of Stewart glory returns. In this gallery was held the ball of Prince Charles Edward, described in "Waverley."
And after this theatric moment, and after the Prince had defeated the "royalists" at Falkirk, Hardy's dragoons slashed these pictures of Scottish kings, since the Prince they could not reach.
There are certain public places of beauty where the beauty is so enveloping that the place seems one's very own, seems possessed. That, I take it, is the great democratic triumph, in that it has made beauty a common possession and places of beauty as free to the people as is the air.
Chief of these is Princes Street Gardens.
I could, in truth I have, spent there days and half-days, and twilights that I would willingly have lengthened to midnights, since the northern night never quite descends, but a romantic gray twilight veils everything, and evokes more than everything. For any lengthened visit in Edinburgh I dare not inhabit a hotel room onthe Garden side, since all my time would be spent at the window. For a shorter visit, such a room lengthens the day, defies the closed gate of the Gardens.
PRINCES STREET.PRINCES STREET.
It was from such a window as this, "From a Window in Princes Street" that Henley looked forth—
"Above the crags that fade and gloomStarts the bare knee of Arthur's Seat;Ridged high against the evening bloomThe Old Town rises, street on street;With lamps bejeweled, straight ahead,Like rampird walls the houses lean,All spired and domed and turreted,Sheer to the valley's darkling green;Ranged in mysterious array,The Castle menacing and austere,Looms through the lingering last of day;And in the silver dusk you hear,Reverberated from crag and scar,Bold bugles blowing points of war."
Princes Street is, I believe, not a mile long, a half-mile the part which is gardened. It is the loveliest street in the world. It seems infinite instead of half-mile.
Of course to the loyal American that praise is received half-way. For he remembers Riverside Drive with the majesty of the Hudson, North Shore Drive with the shoreless infinity of Lake Michigan, Summit Avenue with thedeep gorge of the Upper Mississippi, Quebec and its Esplanade. But even these "handsome streets" cannot match Princes for history and beauty in one, for the old and the new, for the Old Town and the New Town.
Princes Street, to speak briefly of its geography, is a broad thoroughfare, with a medley of buildings on the north side, but uniform in gray stone, where hotels and shops furnish the immediate life of the city. There are electric cars running the full length of the street; and it is the only street I know which is not spoiled through the presence of these necessary carriers.
There are cabs, and there are sight-seeing cars, from which in high advantage, and in half a day, you can see everything in Edinburgh. Yes, actually. I who speak to you have done it, partly for the greed of seeing it steadily and seeing it whole, and partly for the comment of these Scotch coach drivers and guards, who are not merely Scottish but the essence of Scotland. I shall never forget how an American traveler—of course they are all Americans in these tally-hos—commenting on the driver's remark that the "Old Queen" wanted to build a palace where Donaldson's Hospital now stands and she was refused—"but she was the Queen!" Nevertheless, asserted Mr. Sandy Coachman, "She was refused." Not so in the old days of Queenship.
The entire life of Edinburgh, of Scotland, streams through this broad straight street.
On the opposite side lie the Gardens, stretching their way parallel with the street, a wide, green-lawned, tree-forested purlieu, terraced and flowered, with a "sunken garden" near the Castle-side, through which trains are conveyed. The smoke, so much lamented, does often rest with grace and gray loveliness in the hollows of the place, so that one does not miss the waters of the Nor' Loch that once flowed here as moat.
Above rises the castle in greater majesty than from any other point. Down from the castle runs the ridge of the High Street, and the highlandswith flags of washing hanging out the windows which answer the flags red and leoninely rampant, on the buildings of Princes Street. The crown of St. Giles and the spire of the Tronkirk hanging above all.
To the west is St. John's, where in the graveyard Raeburn is buried; and old St. Cuthbert's, where in the graveyard De Quincey is buried. There are Raeburns in the Royal gallery which stands on the island dividing the Gardens, and there are many Raeburns here and there, inprivate rooms of banks and other institutions, rare Raeburns with that casual, direct, human look he could give men and women. The galleries are worth a visit both for their best, and for their not-best. There are statues of famous Scotsmen on the terraces, and of course the Scott monument, beautifully Gothic, and as sacred as a shrine.
There are goods to be bought in the shops, pebbles and cairngorms in jewelry and kickshaws of that ilk; rugs and plaidies, sashes and ties, and Scott and Stevenson books bound in the Royal Stewart silk. Unhappy the traveler who has not provided himself beforehand with a tartan. Almost every one can if he will. And there is always the college of heraldry to help one out. Or the audacity of choosing the tartan you like best; an affront, I assure you, to all good Scots. For however unlovely a Scotch tartan may be in the eyes of the world—nominations are invidious—in the eyes of the clansman there is nothing so "right" as his own particular tartan. He would not exchange it for a Douglass or a Stewart.
These tartans have exerted a very marked effect on the Scottish sense of taste. On Princes Street you may not find such richly dressed women as on Regent Street, but theharmony of colouring will please you better. While no doubt this is due to the fact that for several hundred years the Scottish taste has had the benefit of intimate association with the French, it can also be traced to the longer centuries during which tartans have brought an understanding of colour harmonies. Because there has been this love of colour, there has come with it vanity. With vanity there has come that rare ability of the women of the race to maintain a unity, a harmony, a complete relationship between skirts and waists. There is no country in Europe where the "act of union" at the feminine waistline is so triumphant as in Scotland, particularly in Edinburgh. The universal American achievement has been equaled in Europe only in Scotland.
There are teashops which invite you in, when the wind sweeps too harshly, or the rain beats itself into more than a Scotch mist, or even when the sun shines too hot. There is a garden tea place on top of a high hotel which confronts the Castle. Even in this Far North there is much open air dining, and more especially open air tea-ing. I am not certain that Dr. Johnson would have much cared for this modern tea room, where he might review the world. It seems that he drank much tea whenhe was the guest of Boswell, especially when he was the guest of Mrs. Boswell, in James Court the other side the Gardens. "Boswell has handsome and very spacious rooms, level with the ground on one side of the house, and the other four stories high." And Boswell says of Johnson, "My wife had tea ready for him, which it is well known he delights to drink at all times, particularly when sitting up late." From this roof tea garden one can see James's Court at the top of the Mound, although the Boswell lodgings are burned down. And one can almost see Holyrood, where tea was introduced by James VII.
After you have shopped and had your tea, and the past retakes possession, you will return to the green valley of the Gardens, to forget the clang of the tram cars, to look up at the great Castle Hill, green until it meets the buff-coloured stone and the buff-coloured buildings that seem to grow out of the stone, if it is a clear day; while the ramparts seem temporarily to have blossomed with red geraniums, if red coats are leaning over the edge.
A clear day in Edinburgh is possible. I have spent a month of such days, and have longed for the mists, a touch of them, that the castle might turn to a purple wonder, and the deepblue shadows sink over it, and the gray precipice of the High Street look higher than ever. Gray is in truth the colour of Edinburgh, "the gray metropolis of the North." But it is never a dreary gray, never a heavy gray like London. There the gray is thick, charged with soot; one can rub it from his face. In Edinburgh the gray is luminous, a shifting playing colour, with deep shadows turning to deep blue, with rifts or thinnings of the cloud, through which yellow and brown glimmers make their way.
Above all, Edinburgh is never monotonous. That is perhaps its charm, a something that every feminine city knows; Edinburgh is feminine, and Paris, and Venice, and New Orleans.
And there hangs the castle, sometimes in midair—
"Hast thou seen that lordly castle, that castle by the sea?Golden and red above it the clouds float gorgeously."
Sometimes standing stalwart and stern, a challenge to daring, a challenge to history. That farther edge of the Castle Hill as it is silhouetted against the west sky—if you walk around on Lothian Street you can see the full face of the Rock—has invited many an adventurer, both from within and without.
It was down that steep hill that the sons ofMargaret carried their queen mother, when the hosts of Donalbane were besieging the place, and a Scotch "haar" rolling in from the sea and shutting off the castle enabled the little procession to pass safely with its precious burden, and swiftly down to the Queen's ferry, and across to Dunfermline.
Up the face of that Rock when The Bruce did not hold this stronghold there stole in the night of a thirteenth century winter—it must have been much colder, even in Edinburgh, in the thirteenth century—a picked band of men; picked by Randolph afterward Earl of Moray, and led by Frank, who, years before when he had been a soldier in the castle garrison and night leave was forbidden, used to make his way down this cliff to visit a bonnie lassie in the West Bow. Now, on a wind-swept night, which can be very windy around that castle profile—the wind has not abated since the thirteenth century—Frank led the remembered way. I wonder if he remembered the lassie. But his footing was sure. Once, it is true, the sentinel seemed to have discovered them. But it was only the boast the sentinel makes to the night when he makes his last round. The men huddled against the face of the Rock. Then they moved onward. The ladders were tooshort to reach the rampart. Two were bound together. The men over, the cry "A Moray!" rings in the castle. Scotland has won it again.