Читать книгу Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets - Mrs. Oliphant - Страница 8

THE BASS ROCK

But this hope soon proved futile. Whether it was some traitorous indication from Albany, or information from another source, or pure hazard, which directed the English ships to this one vessel with its royal freight, it had but rounded the headland of Flamborough when it fell into the hands of the enemy. Palm Sunday 1405 was the date of this event, but it was not till the end of Lent 1423, almost exactly eighteen years after, that James came back. The calamity seemed overwhelming to the nation and to all who were not pledged to Albany throughout Scotland. It was the death-warrant of poor old King Robert in his retirement. He lingered out a weary year in sickness and sorrow, and when the anniversary of his son's loss came round again, died at Rothesay, in Bute, amid the lovely lakes and islets of western Scotland—a scene of natural peace and tranquillity, which, let us hope, shed some little balm upon the heart of the helpless superseded sovereign. Perhaps he loved the place because it had given his title to his murdered boy, the hapless David, so gallant and so gay. There is something more than ordinarily pathetic and touching in the misfortunes of the feeble in an age of iron. As civilisation advances they have means of protecting themselves, but not in a time which is all for the strongest. One son buried, like any peasant's son, ignobly in the Abbey of Lindores: the other in an English prison, at the mercy of the "auld enemy," whom Scotland had again and again resisted to the death: and his kingdom entirely gone from him, in the hands of his arrogant and imperious brother; there was nothing left for poor King Robert but to die.

Thus James became at thirteen, and in an English castle, the King of Scotland. His prison, however, proved a noble school instead of an ignoble confinement to his fine and elevated spirit. The name of Stewart has never been so splendidly illustrated as by this patriotic and chivalrous Prince. No doubt it is infinitely to the credit of the English kings, both Henrys, IV and V, that he received from them all the advantages of education that could have been given to a prince of their own blood—advantages by which he profited nobly, acquiring every art and cultivation that belonged to his rank, besides that divine art which no education can communicate, and which is bestowed by what would seem a caprice, were it not divine, upon prince or ploughman as it pleases God. For above all his knightly and kingly qualities, his studies in chivalry and statesmanship, which prepared him to fill the throne of Scotland as no man save his great ancestor Bruce had yet filled it, James Stewart was a poet of no mean rank, not unworthy to be named even in the presence of Chaucer, and well worthy of the place which he has kept in literature. We need not enter here into that part of his history which concerns another locality full of great and princely associations—the noble Castle of Windsor, where the royal youth first saw and sang the lady of his love, "the fairest and the sweeteste yonge flour," of whom he has left one of the most tender and beautiful descriptions that is to be found in all the course of poetry. It is more to our present purpose to tell how, amid all the charms of that courtly residence, so far superior to anything which primitive Scotland could offer in the way of dignity or luxury, the boy-king remained faithful to his country, and maintained the independence for which she had so long struggled. It is said that the one advantage taken of his captivity and youth was to press the old oft-repeated arguments concerning the supposed supremacy of England, and the homage due from the kings of Scotland, upon the boy who bore that title sadly amid the luxury and splendour of what was still a prison, however gracious and kind his jailers might be. No circumstances could have been better suited to impress upon James's mind the conviction that submission was inevitable: and it would have been almost more than mortal virtue on the part of his captors had they not attempted to bring about so advantageous a conviction. King Henry V, under whom it is said the attempt was made, had been most generously liberal to and careful of the boy. He was a man so brilliant in reputation and success that a generous youth might well have been led by enthusiasm into any homage that was suggested, too happy to feel himself thus linked to so great a king; and James was very young, distant from his own country and all native advisers, his very life as well as his liberty in the power of those who asked this submission from him, and the force of circumstances so great that even his own people might have forgiven, and Holy Church could scarcely have hesitated to dispense him from keeping, an obligation entered into under such pressure. But the royal youth stood fast, and was not to be moved by any argument. Boece, whose authority is unfortunately not much to be depended upon, has a still more distinct and graphic story of judgment and firmness on the part of the young captive. He had been, according to this account, taken to France in the train of King Henry, who after the defeat the English had sustained near Orleans, chiefly through the valour of the Scots who had joined the French army, sent for James, and desired him "to pass to the Scots, and to command them to return to Scotland. King Harry promised, gif the said James brought this matter to good effect, not only to remit his ransom but to send him to Scotland with great riches and honour." James answered courteously, with expressions of goodwill and gratitude for the humanity shown towards him, but "I marvel not little," he said, "that thou considerest not how I have no power above the Scots so long as I am ane private man and holden in captivity." The chronicler adds: "Then said King Henry, 'Maist happy people shall they be that happens to get yon noble man to their prince.'" It is a pity that we have no more trustworthy proof of this charming story.

As a matter of fact James attained his freedom only after the death of Albany, when the resistance or the still more effectual indifference to his liberation of the man who alone could profit by his death in prison, or by any unpopular step he might be seduced into making to gain his freedom, was dead, and had ceased from troubling. It would perhaps, however, be false to say that his imprisonment had done him nothing but good. So far as education went this was no doubt the case; but it is possible that in his subsequent life his reforms were too rapid, too thorough-going, too modern, for Scotland. The English sovereigns were richer, stronger, and more potent; the English commonalty more perfectly developed, and more capable of affording a strong support to a monarch who stood against the nobles and their capricious tyranny. James might not have been the enlightened ruler he was but for his training in a region of more advanced and cultivated civilisation; but had he been less enlightened, more on the level of his subjects, he might have had a less terrible end and a longer career.

He returned to Scotland—with the bride of whom he had made so beautiful a picture, preserving her lovely looks and curious garments, and even the blaze of the Balas ruby on her white throat, to be a delight to all the after generations—in 1423, during Lent; and on Passion Sunday, which Boece calls Care Sunday, entered Edinburgh, where there was "a great confluence of people out of all parts of Scotland richt desirous to see him: for many of them," says the chronicle, "had never seen him before, or else at least the prent of his visage was out of their memory." There must indeed have been but few who could recognise the little prince who had been stolen away for safety at twelve in the accomplished man of thirty in all the fulness of his development, a bridegroom, and accustomed to the state and prestige of a richer Court than anything that Scotland could boast, who thus came among them full of the highest hopes and purposes, and surrounded by unusual splendour and wealth. It is true there was the burden behind him of a heavy ransom to pay, but her English kindred, we may well believe, did not suffer the Lady Jane to appear in her new kingdom without every accessory that became a queen; and a noble retinue of adventurous knights, eager to try their prowess against the countrymen of that great Douglas whose name was still so well known, would swell the train of native nobles who attended the sovereign. Old Edinburgh comes to light in the glow of this arrival, not indeed with any distinctness of vision, but with something of the aspect of a capital filled to overflowing with a many-coloured and picturesque crowd. The country folk in their homespun, and all the smaller rank of gentlemen, with their wives in the French hoods which fashion already dictated, thronged the ways and filled every window to see the King come in. It was more like the new setting up of a kingdom, and first invention of that dignity, than a mere return: and eager crowds came from every quarter to see the King, so long a mere name, now suddenly blazing into reality, with all the primitive meaning of the word so much greater and more living than anything that is understood in it now. The King's Grace! after the long sway of the Regent, always darkly feared and suspected, and the feeble deputyship full of abuses of his son Murdoch, it was like a new world to have the true Prince come back, the blood of Bruce, the genuine and native King, not to speak of the fair Princess by his side and the quickened life they brought with them. From the gates of the castle where they first alighted, down the long ridge—through the half-grown town within its narrow walls, where a few high houses, first evidences of the growth of the wealthy burgher class, alternated with the low buildings which they were gradually supplanting—through the massive masonry of the Port with its battlements and towers to the country greenness and freshness of the Canon's Gate which led to the great convent of the valley, there could be no finer scene for a pageant. Holyrood was one of those great monastic establishments in which kings could find a lodgment more luxurious than in their own castles, and though there would scarcely seem as yet to have been any palace attached to that holy house, it was already a frequent residence of royalty, and with all its amenities of parks and gardens would be more fit for the reception of a young queen coming straight from princely Windsor than the narrow chambers in the castle. Among the many presents which she is said to have brought with her from England there is a special mention of fine tapestries for the adornment of her new habitation.

Thus the royal pair took possession of their kingdom, and of the interest and affection of the lively and eager crowd for which Edinburgh has always been famous—a populace more like that of a French town than an English, though with impulses sometimes leading to tragedy. James would scarcely seem to have been settled in that part of the ancient establishment of the abbey which was appropriated to the lodging of the King, or to have exhausted the thanksgivings of Easter and the rejoicings of the restoration, when he set himself to inquire into the state of the country and of the royal finances, to which he had been so long a stranger. There was no Civil List in those days nor votes of supply, and the state of the Crown lands and possessions, "the King's rents," was doubly important in view of the ransom yet to be paid, of which only a fourth part had been remitted as the portion of the Queen. The result of this investigation was anything but satisfactory. It was found that during the reign of Albany many of these possessions had been alienated, made into fiefs, and bestowed upon the leaders of the faction which supported the Regent. "There was nothing left to sustain the Crown," says Boece, "except the customs of burrows. He was naething content of this," adds the chronicler with pithy conciseness, "howbeit he shewed good will (gud vult) for the time." James had already griefs enough against the family of his cousin without this startling discovery; and his "gud vult" would seem rather to have been the serious self-control of a man who was biding his time than any pretence of friendliness with his unfaithful relations and stewards. Amid the early pageants and festivities it is indeed recorded that he knighted Walter Stewart among the other candidates for that honour, the flower of the noble youth, a band of twenty-six gentlemen of the best houses in Scotland; but this was probably a step which was inevitable, as it would have been impossible to leave his own nearest relative out of the list until he had finally made up his mind how the family of Albany was to be treated. It is stated that the complaints and grievances of the people brought him to a decision on this point, and helped him to carry out his revenge upon the house which had, in popular belief at least, the guilt of his brother's blood upon it as well as that of his own long confinement. Walter Stewart, whose only other appearance in history is that of a rebellious and undutiful son whom his father was incapable of keeping in subjection, was arrested in Edinburgh Castle about a year after James's restoration, and after an interval of several months his arrest was followed by that of Duke Murdoch and his son Alexander, both of whom were also seized in Edinburgh Castle, where they had probably retired for safety. A few of their retainers arrested with them were speedily liberated, and it became apparent that upon this doomed family alone was King James's wrath directed. They were tried at Stirling, by a court of their peers, under the presidency of the King himself. The offences charged against them were misgovernment and oppression of the people, the greatest of public sins: but it was no less the end of a long tragedy. The younger branch of the race had been engaged in a struggle with the elder for the last two generations at least: and it had been the royal line that had suffered most during that period. Bitterly, in blood and heartbreak and long suppression, they had been weighed down under superior force: but now the time of reprisals had come. As they stood there confronting each other, the stern young King on one side and his kinsmen on the other, with a quarter of a century of wrong between them, the shadow of the young prince at Falkland, and the old father at Rothesay, and the eighteen years of captivity full in the minds of all, what a day of reckoning at last! It makes the retribution almost more tragic, like the overwhelming fate of the Greek drama, that the men upon their trial had nothing to do with these crimes, unless it might be the last. Murdoch of Albany had not exerted himself to liberate James, but that was his only evident offence, and his sons were not instrumental, so far as appears, in any injury to their royal cousin. The sins of the fathers were to be visited upon the children. We are told that the two sons, young men in the flower of their youth, were executed one day, and their father and maternal grandfather, a very old man, the Earl of Lennox, whose share in the matter it is difficult to make out, on the next. Thus James settled summarily the question between himself and his kinsmen. The house of Albany ended upon the scaffold, and however just their doom might have been, there was something appalling in this swift and sweeping revenge, carried out rigorously without a sign of hesitation by a young king, a happy bridegroom, an accomplished and gay cavalier.

It must indeed be allowed, notwithstanding his poetry and his evident love of everything that was lovely and of good report, that the reign of the first James was a stern one. Every witness agrees as to his accomplishment, and that he was the flower of knighthood, of splendour and courtesy, the most chivalrous, the most daring, the most graceful and gracious of all his Court: and his genius as a poet is even more generally acknowledged. The King's "Quhair" as a poem is quite capable of standing on its own merits, and needs no additional prestige as the performance of a king. Had he been but a wandering minstrel Chaucer would have had no need to be ashamed of his pupil. It is full of delightful descriptions of nature and love and youth: the fresh morning as it rises upon the castled heights, the singing of the birds and fluttering of the leaves, the impulse of a young heart even in the languor of imprisonment to start up and meet the sun, with all the springs of new life which at that verdant season come with every new day—the apparition of the beautiful one suddenly appearing in the old immemorial garden with all its flowers, herself the sweetest and the fairest of flowers, all are set before us, with a harmony and music not to be excelled. The young Prince chafing at his imprisonment, dreaming of all the fantastic wonderful things he might do were he free, yet still so full of irrepressible hope that his impatience and his longings are but another form of pleasure, takes shape and identity as distinct as if he had been one of the figures in that famous pilgrimage to Canterbury, which had been part of his training in this delightful art. If James had never reigned at all he would still have lived through all these centuries in the guise in which he stood at his window on that May morning, and suddenly, amid his youthful dreams, beheld the lovely vision of the Lady Jane emerging from under the young spring verdure of the trees. There is a certain window not generally supposed to be that at which the royal captive stood—a window in the Norman Tower of Windsor Castle, now fitly garnished and guarded by sympathetic hands, from which the spectator looking out upon the deep moat-garden underneath in the circle about the old donjon will scarcely be able to withstand the thrill of feeling which attends a poetic scene and incident fully realised. Nothing could be more green, more fresh, more full of romance and association, than this garden where all is youthful as the May, yet old in endless tradition, the garden of the Edwards and Henrys, where Chaucer himself may have thought over his accounts or taken the delightful image of his young squire "synging" who was, "or flouting all the day" from among some group of bright-faced lads in their bravery, where the countess who dropped her garter may have wandered, and the hapless Henry, the mild and puny child who was born there while James was undergoing his far from harsh captivity, played. James Stewart's name, had he been no king, would have been associated with this place, as that of his master in poetry is with the flowery ways of Kent.

Nor was his inspiration derived alone from the well of English undefiled. A still more wonderful gift developed in him when he got home to his native country. Though the tones of Scotch humour were much less refined, and its utterances at that early period could be scarcely more than the jests and unwritten ballads of the populace, yet his early acquaintance with them must have lingered in the young Prince's mind, acquiring additional zest from the prepossessions of exile and the longing for home. And when the polished singer of the King's "Quhair" found himself again in his native land he seems to have burst forth with the most genuine impulse into the broad fun, rustical and natural and racy of the soil, which perhaps was more congenial to his Scottish audience. "Peblis to the Play" and "Christis Kirk on the Green" are poems full of the very breath of rural life and the rude yet joyous meetings of the country folk at kirk and market, which with wonderfully little difference of sentiment and movement also inspired Burns. He must have had a mind full of variety and wide human sympathy almost Shakspearian, who could step from the musings of Windsor and the beautiful heroine, all romance and ethereal splendour, to the lasses in their gay kirtles, and Hob and Raaf with their rustic "daffing," as true to the life as the Ayrshire clowns of Burns, and all the clumsy yet genial gambols of the village festival. It is one of the most curious and least to be expected transformations of poetic versatility—for it is even amazing how he could know the life into which he thus plunged joyous, as if he had been familiar with it from his childhood. King James was not without an object amid all the laughter and the pranks of his holiday. The King's cheerful ridicule of the clumsy fellows who could not draw the bow was intended, with a prick of scorn under the laughter, to rouse up his rustic lieges to emulation, not to be behind the southern pock-puddings whose deadly arrows were, in every encounter between Scots and English, the chief danger to the fighting men of the north. It is curious that this difference should have existed and continued with such obstinacy through all these fighting centuries; the Scotch spearmen were all but invulnerable in their steady square, like a rock, but they had little defence against the cloth-yard shafts of the English bowmen, which neither exhortation nor ridicule, neither prizes to win nor disaster to fear, could teach them to adopt. James laboured hard, in ways more practical than his poems, to introduce this new arm, but in vain. It was kept up languidly in holiday contentions, like that of Christis Kirk on the Green, while his life lasted; but when his reign was over and the momentary stimulus withdrawn the bows were all thrown away.

The King's command of this humorous vein, so dear to his people, with its trenchant sketches from the life and somewhat rough jests, is wonderful, when his courtly breeding and long separation even from such knowledge of rustic existence as a prince is likely to obtain is considered. And the many-sided nature which made these humours so familiar and easy to him is a strange discovery in the midst of all the tragic circumstances of his life and reign. The union of the most delicate poetry and romance with that genial whim and fancy is unusual enough: but it is still more unusual to find the stern Justiciar, avenger of blood and redresser of wrong, the reconstructer of a distracted country, capable not only of the broad fun of the rustic ballad-maker, but of so tolerant and humorous a view of the humble commons, the underlying masses upon which society is built. For the first aspect of affairs in Scotland could not be a cheerful one: although it was rather with the nobles and gentlemen, the great proprietors of the country, who had to be summoned to exhibit their charters and prove their titles, partly no doubt with the view of discovering what Crown lands had been alienated by the Albany party, that the King's quarrel was, than with the humbler subjects of the nation.

Yet there is no doubt, with all these lights and softening influences of character and genius, that his reign was a stern one. James had everything to reform in the country to which he came with so many new ideas and so enlarged a knowledge of what the internal economy of a nation might be made. It is rather against the general historical estimate of the talents and power of the Regent Albany that the new King should have found, as appears, so much to do for the reorganisation of the commonwealth—regulating the laws, appointing courts of justice, inquiring into the titles of property, and in every other way giving consistency and order to the affairs of Scotland. However, the lavish grants made to the great Scots lords and the licence given them to rule their vassals as they pleased arose not from weakness but from Albany's deliberate policy of securing a strong party on his side, a policy exactly opposed to that of James, whose heart was set on subduing these fierce nobles, and perhaps of developing the people at large, the nation itself, if that is not too modern an ambition. The reign of Law, broken and disturbed by a hundred storms, but still henceforward with a statute-book to fall back upon and some fitful authority at its command, began in Scotland in his day.

There are some curious details in the Scotichronicon about the taxes, now, it would seem, for the first time levied upon the general mass of the people. In 1424, the year after James's return, a tax of twelvepence in the pound was imposed by the Parliament at Perth, for the maintenance of the King's state and payment of his ransom, upon all goods, lands, and annual revenues of whatever description, both spiritual and temporal, which was passed with the consent of the estates, no doubt under the stimulus of the general rejoicing at the King's return. This impost was to last for two years. An income tax so general and all-embracing could scarcely be expected to be popular, but for the first year it was paid, we are told, with readiness, certain of the greatest nobles in the kingdom being appointed in their various districts to the office of collecting. That the Church should have taken her share in the payment of this tax says much for the loyalty of the Scotch priesthood and their unity with the people at this crisis of the national history. In the second year, however, grumblings arose. It is comprehensible that a nation unaccustomed to this pressure should respond to it in a moment of enthusiasm, yet become uneasy under the repetition when the enthusiasm had probably died away, especially if a fear arose that it might become permanent. King James, however, adopted a course not at all usual with governments when the power to exact has once been placed in their hands. When the popular murmur came to his ears he stopped at once the unpopular demand. How the paying of the ransom was carried on, and how the maintenance of the King's state we need not inquire. The Crown lands were no doubt extensive still. Some years later another experiment of the same kind was made; the new tax, however, being only twopence in the pound, and its object the payment of expenses of a mission sent to France to negotiate a marriage between the baby-princess Margaret and the equally juvenile dauphin—an object which does not appear to have appealed to the sympathies of the people, since we are told that it was the cause of immediate murmurs, the King not only stopped the unpopular tax but returned the money to those who had paid it—a most admirable but seldom followed example.

The curious system afterwards employed by all the Scots kings of tours or "raids" of justice throughout the kingdom seems to have originated in James's energetic reign, but he carried not only the officers of the law, but occasionally his entire Parliament with him, moving about to the different centres of Scotland with great impartiality. Sometimes they met at Edinburgh, in the Great Parliament Hall in the Castle, and made "many good laws if they could have been kept," says the chronicler; sometimes at Perth, a favourite residence of the King; and on one memorable occasion so far north as Inverness, where, impatient of continual disquietude in the Highlands, James went to chastise the caterans and bring them within the reach of law. This he did with a severe and unsparing hand, seizing a number of the most eminent chiefs who had been invited to meet him there, and executing certain dangerous individuals among them without mercy. These summary measures would seem to have borne immediate fruit in the almost complete subjugation of the Highlands. But it was hard to reckon with such a restless element as the clans, and hanging and heading were very ineffectual measures among people with whom "another for Hector" was the simplest suggestion of natural law.

It was after this stern Parliament of Inverness that there occurred at Edinburgh one of the most curious and picturesque scenes that it is possible to imagine. One of the chiefs tried at that assize was the greatest and most important of all, the Lord of the Isles, sometimes called Donald and sometimes Alexander by the chroniclers, who on his promise to amend his ways, and no longer harbour caterans or head forays, was, no doubt out of respect for his almost princely position, set at liberty. But no sooner was the fierce chieftain set free, "within a few days after," says the chronicler, than he took and burnt the town of Inverness, in which the Parliament had been held, and showed his impenitence by an utter abuse of the mercy accorded to him. When, however, he heard that the King himself with all the forces of the kingdom was coming against him, Donald hastily disbanded his men and took refuge in the watery fastnesses of his islands: and it would seem that he must have felt the tide of national sentiment to be against him, and his power not equal to make any stand against all the force of peaceful and law-abiding Scotland under the energetic new King. The wily Highlander made his submission in the way which, no doubt, he thought most likely to disarm authority and gain exemption. He choose Easter day, the greatest of religious festivals, for his appearance as a penitent, and in the middle of the service in the Chapel of Holyrood appeared suddenly, almost without clothing, and knelt down before the King "where he was sittand at his orison," praying for grace in the name of Him who rose from the dead that day. So strange an interruption in the midst of all the glories of the Easter mass throws a strange and wild light upon the varieties of national life in Scotland. That half-savage figure, with plaid and weapons cast aside, defenceless, at the King's mercy, in all the primitive abandonment yet calculation of early patriarchal times; while all that the art and culture of a splendid age could do to give magnificence to the most imposing ceremonial of the Church surrounded this strange apparition, the incense rising, the music pealing, the Court in all its glory of flashing jewels and splendid stuffs filling the lofty area. Like some wild god of the mists suddenly gleaming through the fragrant smoke between the bishop's white robes and the kneeling King, what a strange interruption to the mass! The King, at the request of the Queen we are told, gave him his life, as the adjuration addressed to him and all the force of the surroundings gave James little choice but to do; for he could not have offended the sentiment of his people by refusing the boon which was demanded in that Name, however doubtful he might be of the expediency of granting it. "Then the King began to muse," says Boece. He must have been devout indeed to have been able to return to the course of the service with the Islesman before him on his knees, and all that wild half of the kingdom, with its dangerous habits and fierce tribal laws, thus suddenly made visible—a spectre which had often before troubled the King's peace. James had not to learn for the first time that apparent submission from such a suppliant did not necessarily mean any real change, and must have thoroughly felt the hollowness of that histrionic appearance and all the difficulties which beset his own action in the matter. The conclusion was, that the life of the Lord of the Isles was spared, but he was committed to safe keeping in the strong Castle of Tantallon, with, however, the unfailing consequence, that his brother took the field with all his caterans in his stead.

James reigned in Scotland for thirteen years—a reign full of commotion and movement, by which many in high place were humiliated, the spoils of the feudal tyrants taken from them, and the wrongs of the suffering commonalty redressed, proceedings which procured for the King many enemies among the nobility before the force of popular sentiment was strong enough to balance this opposition by its support. He began in Scotland that struggle which for some time had been going on in England against the power of the nobles, who were still in the north something like a number of petty kings ruling in their own right, making little account of national laws, and regarding the King with defiance as almost a hostile power. One of the greatest risks of such a struggle is that it raises now and then a fiery spirit stung by the sense of injury and the rage of deprivation into a wild passion of revenge which bursts every restraint. The Grahams of Strathearn in the north had fallen specially under the rectifying process of James's new laws of property: and out of this house there suddenly arose the tragic figure of an avenger whose brief but terrible career occupies but a single page in history, yet contains all the elements of a fatal drama. Sir Robert Graham, of whose antecedents there is little record, was not the head of the house, but a younger brother of daring character, and one of those fanatics of race to whom the glory of their house is a religion. The first we hear of him is a sudden appearance in the Parliament of January 1435, when he made a fiery and violent speech, ending by an impeachment of the King himself for injustice and robbery. Such an assault would find little support in the public assembly of the States, in the awe of the royal presence, and Graham had to escape for his life, finding means of flight into the Highlands, the ever-ready refuge for rebels. There he launched wild threats against James, which the King, probably well accustomed to missiles of the kind, paid little attention to. The monarch was warned too, we are told, by another wild apparition, which suddenly appears out of the mists for this purpose—a Highland witch of the order of those who drove Macbeth's ambition to frenzy, but whose mission now was to warn James of the mischief brewing against him. The King was brave and careless, used to the continual presence of danger, keeping his Christmas merrily at Perth with all the sports and entertainments with which it was possible to cheat the gloomy weather, and made little but additional mirth both of the prophecy and the threats. Evidently the Court found pleasure in the fair city on the Tay. They were still lingering there, having taken up their residence in the monastery of the Black Friars, at the end of February. In Scotland as elsewhere the great religious houses seem to have been the best adapted to give hospitality to kings. It was long after this date before anything that could be called an independent royal residence was built at Holyrood itself: for generations the King and Court were but guests in the stately abbey, which was, like the monastery of the Black Friars, so convenient and commodious a house both for entertainment and shelter that its great chambers became the natural, as they were the most stately and pleasant, lodging that could be provided for a monarch.

The tragedy that followed is well known. At the end of a pleasant evening when there had been music—in which James himself was the first connoisseur in Scotland, inventing, some say, the national lilt, the rapidly rising and falling strain which is so full of pathos yet so adaptable to mirth—"and other honest solaces of grete pleasance and disport," the sound of trampling feet and angry voices broke upon the conventual stillness outside and the cheerful talk of the friendly group within. The King was taken at a disadvantage, apparently without even a gentleman of his Court near him, nothing but his wife and her ladies lingering for a last moment of pleasant conversation before they went to bed. It is easy to imagine the horror with which the little party must have listened to the rush of the savage band, hoping perhaps at first that it was but some tumult in the street, or affray between the townsfolk and the caterans—never very far off and often threatening St. John's town—till the cries and clashing of the arms came nearer, and wild torch-light flared through the high windows and proved the fatal object of the raid. The groans of a few easily despatched sentinels, the absence of any serious opposition or stand in defence, the horrible discovery of bolts and bars removed and the King at the mercy of his enemies, must have followed in a few terrible moments. No incident in history is better known than that piteous attempt of one distracted girl, a Douglas, born of a heroic race, to bar the door with her own slim arm, thrusting it through the holdfasts from which the bolt had been taken away: poor ineffectual bar! yet enough to gain a moment when moments were so precious, and while there was still a chance of saving the King.

The narrative of the death struggle, and the distracted attempts to find a place of concealment for the victim, are too heartrending to be repeated here. James fell, it is said, with sixteen wounds in him, hacked almost to pieces, yet facing his murderers so desperately that some of them bore the marks of his dying grip when they were brought to the scaffold to be killed in their turn with every circumstance of horror conceivable some time later. The execution of these miserable traitors, one of them the King's own uncle Athole, took place at Edinburgh for the greater solemnity and terror of the punishment, which was accomplished by every kind of torture. The Queen, too, after the horrible scene of which she had been a witness, and almost more than a witness—for she had thrown herself before her husband and had been wounded in the terrible struggle—gathered her children and fled to Edinburgh Castle to put the little heir of the kingdom, now James II, in security. The hapless child was sadly crowned at Holyrood at six years old, with a hastily adapted ceremonial, the first of many such disastrous rites to come.

The time of James's reign had been one of rising prosperity throughout the realm. Law and order had been established in recognised courts and tribunals, the titles of property had been ascertained and secured, not without loss, no doubt, to many arrogant lords who had seized upon stray land without any lawful title, or on whom it had been illegally bestowed during the Albany reign—but to the general confidence and safety. And the condition of the people had no doubt improved in consequence. It is difficult to form any estimate of what this condition was. All foreign witnesses give testimony of an unpleasing kind, and represent the country as wretched, squalid, and uncivilised: but on the other hand nothing can be more unlike this report than the most valuable and unintentional evidence furnished by King James's own poems, with their tale of village merry-makings and frays which convey no impression of abject poverty, nor even of that rudest level of life where material wants are so pressing as to exclude all lighter thoughts. "On Mayday," says King James, "when everybody is bound to Peblis to the play,"

"At Beltane quhan ilke bodie bownis

To Peblis to the play,

To heir the singing and sweit soundis,

The solace suth to say.

Be firth and forest furth they found,

They graythit them full gay;

God wot that wald they do that stound,

For it was thair feist day

They said

Of Peblis to the Play."

All the lasses of the west, he goes on to tell us, were up at cockcrow, and no men might rest for the chatter and the noise of their preparations. One cried that her curch was not starched enough, another that a hood was best, another bewailed herself as "so evil sunburnt" that she was not fit to be seen. The young folk stream along "full bold" with the bagpipes blowing, and every village adding its contingent, "he before and she before to see which was most gay."

"Some said that they were mercat folk,

Some said the Quene of May

Was cumit

Of Peblis to the Play."

When they arrive at the "taverne hous" they give orders that the board be served, and to see that the napery is white, "for we will dyn and daunce." At "Christis Kirk on the Green" there is a similar description, the lasses coming out as before, "weshen clean," in their new grey kirtles "well prest with many plaits," with their gloves of doeskin and morocco shoes. All these incidental traits, and the atmosphere of the merry ballads, though both end in a fray, contradict with vigour the cold and wretched picture given by outsiders of a country where the people warmed themselves by burning sulphureous stones dug out of the ground, where the houses had a cow's hide stretched for a door, and all was squalid misery and nakedness. There was plenty of fighting going on it is evident—not a lowland fair without its broken heads (a habit that, according to Sir Walter Scott, no mean authority, lasted into the nineteenth century)—and much oppression, the great lords reigning like absolute tyrants in the midst of subjects without resource or protection; but the case of the peasantry notwithstanding all these evils does not seem to have been a bad one. A certain vigorous capacity of revival, which history shows us continually as existing on the broad level of the soil, must have brought them back to rough ease and comfort, and the freedom of the natural healthful atmosphere which makes itself apparent in transcripts of life so little likely to be forced or optimistic. In all times and circumstances there can be little doubt that the amount of simple enjoyment to be got out of life, especially by the young, who form at least the half of every community, far exceeds the elements of wellbeing which outsiders see in it. And the protection of the Church, the comparative quiet to be enjoyed on church lands, the charities and succour of the cloister, must have made an incalculable addition to the possibilities of existence. Everything in James's reign was calculated to increase the stability and good order which are the best guarantees of national life; even his severities cultivating a sense of security in the weak and a wholesome consciousness of the necessity of self-restraint in the strong. For the first time for many generations the nobles were kept within bounds, and exceptional cruelties became if not impossible, yet of so certain discovery and punishment that lesser tyrants at least must have trembled. The law that might makes right fell into temporary disuse, and a better law, that of the courts that sat periodically over all the kingdom, and—appealing still more strongly to the imagination—a king that shut his ears to no petition and interfered with a strong hand to right the wronged, began a new era for the commonalty of Scotland. Even the unfavourable description so often quoted of Eneas Silvius, reports the common people as having "abundance of flesh and fish," no small ingredient of wellbeing, and records rather a complete absence of luxuries than that want which reduces the vital strength of a nation. The same authority tells of exportations of "hides, wool, salt fish, and pearls," the latter a curious item, although there were as yet no manufactures, and even such necessaries as horse-shoes and every kind of harness had to be imported from Flanders. But the Scots in their farmhouses and cottages made the cloth with which they were clothed, and their "blew caps," the well-known blue bonnet which has lasted to our own days. And they retained the right which, according to her monkish chronicler, St. Margaret had been the first to secure for them—of immunity from all military requisitions, and even, which is a curious contradiction of the supposed tyrannies of the nobles, held an absolute property in their own goods which out of the island of Great Britain no peasantry in the world possessed. The French allies who were in Scotland in the end of the fourteenth century were struck with angry consternation to hear themselves hailed by a set of clodhoppers, and bidden to keep the paths and not trample down the growing corn, and to find that, however willing the Scots men-at-arms might be to harry England when occasion offered, not the greatest lord in the French contingent could carry off a cow or a brace of pullets without compensation. We cannot but think that the country in which the peasant's barnyard was thus defended was at least as forward in the best elements of civilisation as those in which there were hangings of arras and trenches of silver, but no security for anything in homesteads or workshop which might be coveted by the seigneur.

HOLYROOD

Edinburgh, as has been said, never seems to have been a favourite habitation of this enlightened and accomplished Prince. Perhaps Queen Jane found the east winds too keen on the heights, or the Abbey of the Holy Rood too low in the valley. The heir was born there it is true, and we have note of various Parliaments and visits, but no settled residence in the capital. One incident is mentioned by the chroniclers which must have afforded a picturesque scene, when the King himself presided, before the gates of Edinburgh Castle, at a duel between a knight called Henry Knokkis or Knox (curious precursor in the dimness of distance of another of his name!), who had been accused by an Edinburgh burgess of treasonable speeches against the King—and his accuser. But who this accuser was, and by what privilege he was allowed to meet a gentleman and knight in single combat we have no information. Perhaps he was himself of noble blood, a younger son, a man before his time, seeking the peaceful profits of trade instead of those of the marauder, as it has become the fashion of a later age to do. It is almost impossible not to fancy that there must have been a touch of the burlesque in this combat, which James himself interfered to stop, separating the combatants. He was very careless it would seem of treasonable speeches, apt to treat them lightly and very probably smiled a little at the zeal of the citizen who was more jealous of his honour than he was himself. The platform before the gates would still make a splendid area for any feat of arms, if the winds did not interfere before the King and blow the combatants away: and the old-world crowd with their many colours, the jerkins slashed and embroidered with the blazon of all the great families in Scotland, the plumed caps and dazzling helmets of courtier and knight, the border of blue bonnets outside, and all the shining array of fair ladies around and behind the throne, would present a more striking picture than the best we could do nowadays. Let us hope the sun shone and warmed the keen clear air, and threw into high relief the towers and bastions against the northern blue.

Edinburgh by this time had grown into the proportions of a town. The houses which the citizens had the privilege of building within the castle precincts would appear to have been low, to secure the protection of the walls; and by certain precautionary regulations for their preservation from fire it would seem that many of them were still thatched. The King's residence there, judging from the straitened accommodation, which was all that existed in a much more advanced period, must have been small and poor, though there already existed a Parliament Hall, in which probably other great assemblies were held. The city walls were continued along the crest of the ridge in narrow lines, deflecting a little only on the south side, where the limits were broken by several wealthy and well-cultivated enclosures where brotherhoods were established—White and Black Friars, sons of Augustine and Dominic, with their great detached houses, their gardens always an example of husbandry, and chapels filling the air with pleasant sound of bells. King James had himself endowed, besides many existing foundations, a monastery for the Franciscans or Grey Friars, which has always continued to be one of the chief ecclesiastic centres of Edinburgh. It was so fine a building, as the story goes, that the humble-minded Minors declined at first to take possession of it as being too magnificent for an Order vowed to poverty; though as their superior was a monk from Cologne, sent for by the King on account of his learning and sanctity, and accustomed to the great convents of the Continent, such an objection is curious. On the south side of the town, at some distance outside the walls, on the platform afterwards occupied by the buildings of the old High School, stood amid its blossoming gardens the Church of St. Mary in the Field, afterwards so fatally known as the Kirk of Field, a great house so extensive and stately that it had already served on several occasions as a royal lodging. St. Giles's, one of the oldest foundations of all, stood among its graves, at the foot of the Castle Hill in the centre of the life of ancient Edinburgh, as it does still. These clusters of sacred buildings, encircled by their orchards and gardens, made a fringe of verdure, of charity and peace, sanctuaries for the living and resting-places for the dead, round the strong and dark fortifications of the little royal town, which hitherto had held for its life upon that ridge of rock, a dangerous eminence lying full in every invader's way.