Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

It is a Saturday evening in Holyrood,—the evening of Saturday, the 26th of March 1603. All is dull and sleepy within the Palace, the King and Queen having retired after supper, and the lights in the apartments now going out one by one. Suddenly, hark! what noise is that without? There is first a battering at the gate, and then the sound of a horse’s hoofs in the courtyard, and of a bustling of the palace servants round some late arriver. It is the English Sir Robert Cary, brother of Lord Hunsdon. He had left London between nine and ten o’clock in the forenoon of the 24th; he had ridden as never man rode before, spur and gallop, spur and gallop, all the way, through that day and the next and the next, the two intervening nights hardly excepted; and here he is at Holyrood on the evening of the third day,—an incredible ride! His horse, the last he has been on, is taken from him all a-foam; and he himself, his head bloody with a wound received by a fall and a kick from the horse in the last portion of his journey, makes his way staggeringly, under escort, into the aroused King’s presence. Throwing himself on his knees before his half-dressed Majesty, he can but pant out, in his fatigue and excitement, these words in explanation of the cause of his being there so unceremoniously: “Queen Elizabeth is dead, and your Majesty is King of England.”

It was the most superb moment of King James’s life. He was in the thirty-seventh year of his age, and had been King of Scotland for nearly thirty-six years; but through the last twenty of these,—or, at all events, ever since February 1586–7, when the captivity of his mother came to its tragical close at Fotheringay,—his constant thought had been of the chance he had of being one day King also of England. Latterly the chance had grown into a probability; but it had never become a certainty. Although, according to all ordinary legal construction of the case, his hereditary claim to the English succession was paramount, there were impediments in the way. There were vehement objections to him on the part of large sections of the English community; and that especial and official recognition of his claims which might have gone far to overcome these objections, or to neutralise them, had remained wanting. Queen Elizabeth herself had, or was supposed to have, the right of nominating her successor; but, though her relations to James through the whole of his Scottish reign had been condescendingly kindly,—though she had been in the habit of sending him letters of semi-parental advice, and sometimes of rebuke, in his minority, and had then and since shown her interest in him by allowing him a regular annual pension of English money, of no great amount but very welcome to him as a substantial supplement to his scanty Scottish revenues,—she had always resisted his importunities in what was with him the all-important matter of his succession to her crown. Her declaration on that subject had been tantalisingly postponed; and James had been obliged to content himself with secret negotiations with such of her English statesmen and courtiers as might be able to persuade her to some distinct decision in his favour while there was yet time, or, if that should not be accomplished, might have influence themselves in bringing about the event which she had left undetermined. Such negotiations round the imperious old queen, clinging to life and sovereignty as she did, and regarding as little better than treason all speculation as to what would be after her death, were necessarily perilous; but they had been going on for some time, with the result that a party had been formed in the English Court favourable to the succession of King James, should circumstances make it possible. At the centre of this party was Secretary Sir Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s chief minister since the death of his father, the great Lord Burleigh, in 1598.

Elizabeth died in her palace at Richmond, in the seventieth year of her age, about three o’clock in the morning of Thursday the 24th of March 1602 (so in the English reckoning, but in the Scottish it was 1603), after an illness of some days, during the first four of which she lay in great pain on cushions, and partly delirious, refusing to go to bed or to take any food. Her Councillors, Secretary Cecil and Archbishop Whitgift among them, had been in attendance from the first; and they had contrived, on the day before her death, while she was lying speechless in the bed into which they had at last forced her, to extract a sign from her which intimated her consent that James should be her successor, or which they found it convenient to construe to that effect. No sooner was she dead than there was a meeting of the Council in an apartment near that in which the corpse lay, to draft a proclamation of James as the new sovereign, and to take other measures necessary in the crisis. Secrecy was essential for a few hours; and, as the palace was full of people, including the weeping court-ladies and others not of the Council, there were orders that the gates should be shut, and that no one should be permitted either to leave the palace or to enter it without special warrant.

One person managed to evade the order and get in. This was the Sir Robert Cary of whom we have just heard. He was then a man of about forty-three years of age, and well known at Court, both from his high family connections and on his own account. His father, the late Lord Hunsdon, had been distinguished among Elizabeth’s councillors by being related to her by cousinship; his brother, the present Lord Hunsdon, was now of the Council; and a sister of his, Lady Scroope, was one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. His own services in the Queen’s employment had been very various and had extended over many years. Among diplomatic missions on which she had sent him in his youth had been several to King James in Scotland; and latterly he had been in charge of one of the English wardenships on the Scottish Borders, and conspicuous for his vigour in the garrisoned defence of those northern parts of England against the cattle-lifting raids of their rough Scottish neighbours. While in this post, he had incurred the Queen’s disfavour by marrying,—a fault which she always resented in any of her courtiers; and for a while she had refused to see him or speak with him. He had contrived, however, to pacify her in a skilfully obtained interview; and that cloud had blown over. Hence, having come south on furlough from his wardenship just about the time when the Queen was seized with her fatal illness, and having taken lodgings in Richmond to await the issue, he had been admitted easily enough into the dying Queen’s presence. “When I came to Court,” he tells us, “I found the Queen ill-disposed, and she kept her inner lodging; yet she, hearing of my arrival, sent for me. I found her in one of her withdrawing chambers, sitting low upon her cushions. She called me to her. I kissed her hand, and told her it was my chiefest happiness to see her in safety, and in health, which I wished might long continue. She took me by the hand, and wrung it hard, and said ‘No, Robin, I am not well,’ and then discoursed with me of her indisposition, and that her heart had been sad and heavy for ten or twelve days; and in her discourse she fetched not so few as forty or fifty great sighs. I was grieved at the first to see her in this plight; for in all my lifetime before I never knew her fetch a sigh, but when the Queen of Scots was beheaded.” This interview was on the night of Saturday, the 19th of March; and it was within the next day or two that, learning from his sister that the Queen had become worse and worse, and that there was no hope of her recovery, and remembering his friendly intercourse with the Scottish King on former occasions, he despatched a letter to James announcing the condition of affairs at Richmond, and resolved moreover that, when the Queen was actually dead, he would be himself the first man to carry the great news to Edinburgh. Once again he was in the death-chamber. It was on the day before the Queen’s death,—that Wednesday, the 23d of March, on which, lying speechless in bed, she gave the sign which Cecil and the other councillors construed as they desired. Among those who stood by her bedside on the evening of that day, while Archbishop Whitgift prayed with her several times in succession, was Sir Robert Cary. It was late, he tells us, when the group broke up, and the Queen was left to die, with only her waiting-women around her. Sir Robert had then gone to his lodgings in the town, and had given instructions that he should be called at the proper moment. Accordingly, about three o’clock on the following morning, when he knew for certain that the Queen was dead, he was at the palace gate. The porter had just received his orders not to admit any one that was not privileged; and even the bribe with which Sir Robert had already primed that official would not have been enough, had not one of the councillors, who chanced to be at the gate at the time, taken the responsibility of passing him in. He made his way through the chamber in which the weeping ladies were to that in which the councillors were assembled and were drafting their documents. His brother, Lord Hunsdon, and his sister, Lady Scroope, being already in his confidence, and his purpose having been guessed by Cecil and the rest, he found that they were very angry with him, and were making arrangements of their own for the necessary despatches to Edinburgh. In fact, they laid hold of him, told him he must remain where he was till their pleasure should be known, and, to show that they were in earnest, sent peremptory fresh orders to the porter that no one was to be allowed to pass the gates except the servants that were to be sent presently to get ready the coaches and horses for the conveyance of the councillors themselves to Westminster. For an hour or so, Sir Robert walked about in the palace chagrined and disconcerted. He had got in with difficulty; but his exit seemed impossible. Bethinking himself at last, he went to the private chamber of his brother, Lord Hunsdon. His lordship, overpowered with the fatigues of the preceding days, was asleep, but was soon roused, and willing to assist. The two went together to the porter’s gate, where the Council’s servants were just making their egress to bring the horses and coaches. The porter could not prevent a great officer like Lord Hunsdon from going out with them; but he stopped Sir Robert. It needed some exertion and some angry words from Lord Hunsdon to cow the man; but this was accomplished, and Sir Robert, to his great relief, found himself outside the gate in the raw air of the dim March morning.

Not even yet were his difficulties over. Speeding from Richmond as fast as he could, he was in Westminster by himself, and in a friend’s house there, some time before the Lords of Council arrived in their coaches. Learning, however, after they had arrived, that they were holding a meeting in Whitehall Gardens to make final arrangements for the proclamations of the new sovereign both in Westminster and in the City, he thought it might be as well to try again whether they would employ him for the service on which he had set his heart. He sent them word, therefore, that he was in town, and was waiting their pleasure. It was now past nine o’clock, and the proclamations were to be at ten. The answer of the Council was a request to Sir Robert to come to them immediately; and, as it was conveyed with a kind of intimation that he would find them perfectly agreeable now to his proposal, he hastened to attend them. He was actually between the outer and the inner gate of Whitehall for this purpose, when a word sent out to him by a friendly councillor made him aware that the Council were deceiving him, and that, if he appeared among them, he would be laid fast. Then he hesitated no longer. Giving the Council the slip, and not staying for the proclamations or for anything else, he took horse at once, somewhere near Charing Cross, and was off for his tremendous ride northwards. He himself tells us the successive stages of his ride. He was at Doncaster that night, a distance of 155 miles from London; next night he reached a house of his own at Witherington in Northumberland, about 130 miles from Doncaster; leaving Witherington on Saturday morning, he accomplished some 50 miles more before noon that day, bringing him to Norham, close to the Tweed; after which there were still about 65 miles of that Scottish portion of his ride which lay between Norham and Edinburgh. He had hoped to be at Holyrood House before supper-time; but his dizziness and loss of blood from the fall from his horse in this last portion of his journey delayed him, as we have seen, for an hour or two.

After his first abrupt salutation of King James in Holyrood that Saturday night, there was naturally a longish colloquy between them. In the course of this colloquy the King’s first excitement of joy was damped for a moment by the reflection that the messenger had come of his own motive merely, and without letters from the English Privy Council. The production of a sapphire ring by Sir Robert removed, he tells us, all doubts. The ring, it appears, had been thrown to him out of one of the windows of Richmond Palace, just before he left, by his sister Lady Scroope; and one account makes it out that it had been a gift by King James himself to Queen Elizabeth, and that Lady Scroope took it off the withered finger of the Queen after her death, to serve as a token that could not be mistaken. Sir Robert’s own account does not quite imply this, but _may_ be so interpreted. All the members of the Hunsdon family, one gathers, were known to King James as having been for some time active in his interest. It was late before the colloquy ended, and Sir Robert was dismissed by the King for his much-needed rest of some days, in or near Holyrood, in charge of the Master of the Household, and under care of a surgeon.

Next day was Sunday; and, whatever whispers of the great event there may have been round King James himself in Holyrood, it does not appear that there was any hint of it that day among the congregations of the lieges in the Edinburgh churches. It is hardly possible that on the following day, when the proclamations of the new sovereign were palpitating northwards through England, with huzzas from town to town, in the very track of Sir Robert’s ride (he had himself ordered them in Northumberland), the community of Edinburgh could still have remained ignorant of what had happened. There could be no public recognition of it, however, till the arrival of the authorised envoys from the English Privy Council; and they did not arrive,—the laggards!—till the morning of Tuesday, the 29th of March. They were Sir Charles Percy, brother of the Earl of Northumberland, and Thomas Somerset, Esq., one of the sons of the Earl of Worcester; and they brought with them two documents. One was a copy of the Proclamation of King James that had been made in London and Westminster on the 24th. It was certified by the signatures of the Lord Mayor of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Chancellor Egerton, and twenty-seven more of the noblemen, prelates, and knights of the English Council; and it opened thus—“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God to call to his mercy out of this transitory life our Sovereign Lady, the high and mighty princess, Elizabeth, late Queen of England, France, and Ireland, by whose death and dissolution the Imperial crowns of these realms foresaid are now absolutely, wholly, and solely, come to the high and mighty prince, James the Sixth, King of Scotland, who is lineally and lawfully descended from the body of Margaret, daughter of the high and renowned prince, Henry the Seventh, King of England, France, and Ireland, his great-great-grandfather,—the said Lady Margaret being lawfully begotten of the body of Elizabeth, daughter to King Edward the Fourth, by which happy conjunction both the Houses of York and Lancaster were united, to the joy unspeakable of this kingdom, formerly rent and torn by long dissension of bloody and civil wars,—the same Lady Margaret being also the eldest sister of Henry the Eighth, of famous memory, King of England as aforesaid: We therefore, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of this realm, being here assembled, united and assisted with those of her late Majesty’s Privy Council, and with great numbers of other principal gentlemen of quality in the kingdom, with the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Citizens of London, and a multitude of other good subjects and commons of this realm, thirsting now after nothing so much as to make it known to all persons who it is that, by law, by lineal succession, and undoubted right, is now become the only Sovereign Lord and King of these imperial crowns, to the intent that, by virtue of his power, wisdom, and godly courage, all things may be provided for which may prevent or resist either foreign attempts or popular disorder, tending to the breach of the present peace or to the prejudice of his Majesty’s future quiet, do now hereby, with one full voice, and consent of tongue and heart, publicly proclaim that the high and mighty prince, James the Sixth, King of Scotland, is now, by the death of our late Sovereign, Queen of England, of famous memory, become also our only lawful and rightful liege lord, James the First, King of England, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith.” The other document was a missive letter to King James, signed by nearly the same persons, and expressing their profound allegiance to him individually, and their desire to see him in England as speedily as possible. It contained, however, this paragraph:—“Further, we have thought meet and necessary to advertise your Highness that Sir Robert Cary is this morning departed from hence towards your Majesty, not only without the consent of any of us who were present at Richmond at the time of our late Sovereign’s decease, but also contrary to such commandment as we had power to lay upon him, and to all decency, good manners, and respects which he owed to so many persons of our degree; whereby it may be that your Highness, hearing by a bare report of the death of our late Queen, and not of our care and diligence in establishing of your Majesty’s right here in such manner as is above specified, may either receive report or conceive doubts of other matter than (God be thanked) there is cause you should: which we would have clearly prevented if he had borne so much respect to us as to have stayed for our common relation of our proceedings and not thought it better to anticipate the same; for we would have been loth that any person of quality should have gone from hence who should not, with report of her death, have been able to relate the just effects of our assured loyalties.” Both documents were read that day in the Scottish Privy Council in Edinburgh; and their purport was published for the general information.

What commotion in Edinburgh through the next few days! The King’s leave-taking had to be hurried; and it was on Sunday the 3d of April that, rising from his place in St. Giles’s Church after the sermon, he made what had to pass as his farewell speech to all his Scottish subjects. It was a speech intended to console them for their grievous loss. “There is no more difference,” he said, “betwixt London and Edinburgh, yea, not so much, as betwixt Inverness or Aberdeen and Edinburgh; for all our marches are dry, and there be no ferries betwixt them”; and, after dilating somewhat further on the undeniable fact of the geographical continuity of his new kingdom with his old, he mentioned one of its probable consequences. “Ye mister [need] not doubt,” he said in conclusion, “but, as I have a body as able as any king in Europe, whereby I am able to travel, so I sall visie you every three year at the least, or ofter as I sall have occasion.” On Tuesday, 5th April, all being ready for his departure, there was the long procession, amid thunders of cannon from the Castle, which conducted him out of Edinburgh towards Berwick, there to begin the very leisurely tour through the northern and midland counties of England by which he came to London early in May. Many Scottish lords and gentlemen were in his retinue, but none of the royal family. The Queen, Prince Henry, and the Princess Elizabeth were to follow soon; and Prince Charles, afterwards Charles I., then a rickety child in his third year, and unfit to travel, was to remain in Scotland for about a year longer, under the charge of Lord and Lady Fyvie, afterwards known as Earl and Countess of Dunfermline.

From and after the 5th of April 1603 Holyrood, though not quite left to the rats, was no longer the home of royalty. King James’s parting promise that he would revisit his native kingdom at least once every three years passed out of his mind; and not till 1617, fourteen years after the ecstatic delight of his removal to the banks of the Thames, did he find it worth while to recross the Tweed. Holyrood, with the other royal palaces of Scotland, was then refurbished for his temporary accommodation; but with that exception, and the further exception of two subsequent visits of Charles I. to Edinburgh, there was to be no sight of a sovereign face for many a day in the towered edifice under Arthur Seat. For Scotland as a whole, indeed, the five-and-thirty years which intervened between 1603 and 1638 may be described as that period of her history during which, though still retaining a nominal apparatus of independent autonomy, in the shape of a resident Scottish Privy Council and an occasional meeting of a Scottish Parliament, she was governed essentially and in the main from London through the post. “This I must say for Scotland, and may truly vaunt it,” said King James in a speech of rebuke to his somewhat troublesome English Parliament on the 31st of March 1607: “here I sit and govern it with my pen; I write, and it is done; and by a clerk of the council I govern Scotland now,—which my ancestors could not do by the sword.” The words were perfectly true; and they remained true for his son and successor, Charles I., till that point in his reign when the soul of Scotland flashed out again in her “National Covenant,” electrifying the dormant Puritanism of England, and initiating the great Seventeenth Century Revolution in all the British Islands.

It is so long ago now, and so much has happened between, that one almost forgets to ask what became of Sir Robert Cary. Should there be any interest in that subject, however, here are the facts in brief:—Though appointed by King James, before he left Edinburgh, to be one of the gentlemen of his bedchamber, and promised further promotion, he did not at first benefit so much as he had expected from his signal piece of service to that King. After accompanying the King to England, he lost even his place in the bedchamber, and, probably from the grudge which Secretary Cecil and the other English councillors still owed to him, was kept otherwise in the background for some time. Gradually, however, he recovered favour. His first considerable rise was when Lord and Lady Dunfermline brought the sickly Prince Charles into England. Sir Robert Cary’s wife was then selected as the fittest person to succeed Lady Dunfermline in the charge of the delicate boy; and the honour to Sir Robert and his wife was the less envied them because it was generally expected that the boy would die in their hands. But he grew up under their careful tending, with evident improvement of his health year after year from his fifth year to his eleventh; and this ensured their future fortunes. Queen Anne always stood their friend, and influenced the King in their favour; Prince Henry, while he lived, treated them with respect; and after Prince Henry’s death in 1612, when Prince Charles became heir-apparent in his room, who but Sir Robert Cary could be the chief man about the heir-apparent and the chamberlain of his household? There were ups and downs still; but Sir Robert and his wife had gifts and pensions, saw their sons and daughters suitably married, and found themselves in the English peerage at last. In 1621 Sir Robert became Baron Leppington. This was his last honour from King James; but in March 1626, at the coronation of Charles I., he was created Earl of Monmouth. He was then about sixty-six years of age; and he lived in that dignity till 1639, when he died at the age of about eighty. His _Memoirs_, written by himself, were first published from the manuscript in 1759.

PROPOSED MEMORIAL TO DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN.[4]

It is two centuries and a half since Drummond of Hawthornden died; but he is still one of the most interesting figures in Scottish history. “A genius the most polite and verdant that ever the Scottish nation produced” was the character given of him in 1656 by Milton’s nephew and pupil, Edward Phillips, in the preface to a collective edition of Drummond’s poems brought out in London that year under Phillips’s editorial care. Very possibly the words are Milton’s own; for Phillips derived his notions of poetry from Milton, and there is other evidence of Milton’s familiarity with the poetry of Drummond. At all events the words are singularly exact for their purpose. They imply, it is true, an imperfect recollection, if not a total ignorance, of the previous wealth of Scottish poetry, represented in such predecessors of Drummond as Barbour, James I., Henryson, Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David Lindsay; but, even had Phillips’s recollection of these been clearer and stronger than it was, his selection of the words “polite” and “verdant” as descriptive of those characteristics of Drummond’s genius which were surest to strike Englishmen would not have been so much amiss, while for the range of Scottish time actually within Phillips’s retrospect at the moment the wording of the eulogy was perfect.

The famous series of the older Scottish poets had come to an end on the death of Lindsay just before the Reformation; and from that time it seemed as if the Literary Muses had all but vanished from Scotland, dispossessed and superseded by quite another order of Muses, if that name can be stretched so as anyhow to include them,—the rougher and angrier Muses of vexed national questions, and especially of the Kirk Controversy. Call them Muses or what else you will, they were very momentous powers, and he is but a feeble Scot who will speak of them with contumely, or will ignore the great effects for Scotland and for all Britain that came out of their turmoil. Not the less it is depressing to Scottish patriotism nowadays to remember how long the turmoil lasted, how all-engrossing it was, and how much of native faculty and aspiration of the finer, deeper, and quieter sorts it must have stifled and extinguished. For the first twenty years after the Reformation there is the compensation, indeed, of the oratory and pre-eminent prose energy of Knox, and of the great literary fame and exquisite Latinity of Buchanan; but from the year 1580 onwards till 1725, or thereabouts, what a long tract of sterility in the literary annals of Scotland! Through that century and a half England prodigiously surpassed her former self, first astonishing the world by the outburst of her Elizabethan splendours, and then continuing the astonishment by the rich and varied literary activity of three succeeding ages, the latest of which was that of the Queen Anne wits. Scotland, on the other hand, had sunk incredibly below the promise of _her_ former self. The Scottish pre-Reformation poets had been comparable, or more than comparable, with the very best of their English coevals, Chaucer alone deducted; but, when the literary historian, leaving the crowded series of lustrous names, from those of Spenser, Bacon, and Shakespeare at one end, to those of Dryden and Pope at the other, which represent the literature of South Britain between 1580 and 1725, seeks in North Britain for equivalents, what does he find? No equivalents in the highest degree; but, at the utmost, if he mixes any strictness of conscience with his kindliness, only such an exception here and there to the general sterility that, if it is of the racy vernacular sort, it can be noted apart with pleasure on that account, or, if it is cognate with anything in the English series, it can be moved along that series till the proper interstice is found into which it can be fitted.

One indubitable exception, the exception in chief, was Drummond of Hawthornden. Born amid a people almost wholly absorbed in their Kirk controversy, it had somehow happened that here was one Scot whose ideal of life differed from the common. Of a meditative and philosophical temperament from his boyhood, a lover of books, art, and music, and with his tastes in such matters educated by foreign travel and by a familiarity with the recent English Elizabethan literature which must have been then excessively rare in North Britain, he had no sooner become Laird of Hawthornden by his father’s death in 1610 than, abjuring all other occupations, he schemed out for himself that life of studious leisure which suited him best, and for which there could not, in all Scotland, have been a more beautiful home than the leafy dell of his lairdship and habitation:—

“Dear wood, and you, sweet solitary place,
Where from the vulgar I estranged live.”

Here, accordingly, it was that, between 1610, when he was in his twenty-fifth year, and 1625, when he was in his fortieth, he wrote at intervals, and uniformly in that southern English which he foresaw was thenceforward to be the general literary tongue of the British Islands, most of the poems by which he is now remembered. The quantity altogether was not large, and the pieces were all short individually; but the quality was genuine. No such poetry of artist-like delight in beauty of scenery, the soft and luscious in colour, form, language, and sound, pervaded at the same time by such a fine and high vein of pensive reflectiveness, had appeared in Scotland for many a day. This was at once recognised among his own countrymen; but the poems, or the rumour of them, went beyond Scotland. Before the close of the reign of the Scottish King James in England, Drummond was certainly the one man living in Scotland who was thought of by the London men of letters round the Court of that King as belonging, by right of real merit, to the poetic brotherhood of the reign. A London Scot or two, it is true, having the advantages of proximity and of Court connection, did divide with Drummond the applauses of the London circle of critics for Scottish merit in English verse-making; but, if the vote had been seriously taken, it was to Drummond that the competent judges would have sent the laurel. Hence, indeed, some of the most memorable incidents in Drummond’s biography. Hence it was that the Elizabethan veteran Michael Drayton entered into such loving correspondence with him, addressing him “my dear, noble Drummond”; hence it was that, when any eminent Londoner chanced to make a tour in Scotland, he was sure to seek an introduction to Drummond; and hence that immortal visit of the great Ben Jonson himself, when he was Drummond’s guest in Hawthornden for a whole week in the winter of 1618–9, entertained Drummond with all the gossip of London for thirty years back, stunned him with loud talk about everything, and drank an immensity of his wine. Phillips’s encomium of 1656, when Drummond had been seven years dead, only expressed, one can see, an opinion already formed while Drummond was still alive, and in the prime of his manhood.

The encomium included, or ought to have included, more than Drummond’s performances in verse. His fine and verdant genius is no less discernible in his prose writings. His little essay entitled “A Cypress Grove” is a piece of prose so superlatively excellent that one wonders how it should be so little known,—why, in fact, it should not have had a prominent place in all professed collections of the flowers of English seventeenth-century prose. For high-toned philosophic thoughtfulness, ingenuity of artistic phantasy, musical beauty of style, and perfection of literary taste and finish, there is nothing superior, of the same length, if anything quite equal, in all Sir Thomas Browne, or in all Jeremy Taylor. That essay was published in 1623, as an adjunct to one of his volumes of poems; and, though there is a good deal of other and later prose from Drummond, it is mainly of a character less readable now, and less acceptable in some quarters where it may still receive attention. For the _quæstiones vexatæ_ did at last coil themselves round Drummond, and in his later years, in his own despite, he had to become a polemical politician. King James had been succeeded by King Charles; on the 23d of July 1637 Jenny Geddes hurled her stool in St. Giles’s; and Scotland then passed into that trebly troubled period of her always troubled history which, commencing with her own defiance to Charles and Laud in her National Scottish Covenant, and proceeding thence to her alliance with the English Parliamentarians in the Solemn League and Covenant, includes Montrose’s brief year of Royalist outblaze and anti-Covenanting triumph, and all the rest of the chequered sequel till the English Republicans brought Charles to the block. No Scot through that long agony was permitted to be neutral; if any one had tried, he would have been torn from his retirement, and obliged to declare himself. Drummond did declare himself, and it was on what was then, and still is, among his countrymen, the unpopular side. In a series of prose tracts, circulated surreptitiously, some of them of the nature of satirical squibs, he advocated views of Scottish politics which were very much those of Montrose and the Hamiltons. Even where this may be remembered, in a general way, to his discredit now, there is much, however, in the tracts themselves to arrest the unfavourable judgment and turn it into respect. Their literary ability and clever wit may count for little with those who resent their purport; but there are passages of high-minded and eloquent earnestness that must startle any reader in such a context. While inculcating upon his countrymen an effete and impracticable political philosophy of passive obedience, and while indicating a preference on Drummond’s own part for something of that florid Anglican ecclesiasticism against which his countrymen were fighting, he flings out to the right and to the left remonstrances much needed on both sides, and especially a doctrine of religious toleration far beyond the apprehension of either, or of the time generally. Laud he virtually shoves aside as an interloper; and, on the whole, the substance of the tracts, in one of the two directions to which they were addressed, is like a message to Charles that he had been unfortunately wrong in his Scottish policy from the first, inasmuch as Scotland always had been Scotland, was Scotland still, and could not be drilled by any mortal force against her own will into anything else. Here, in fact, Drummond reveals his very heart. A disciple though he was of the English Elizabethans in literature, deploring the low condition of Scottish literature in comparison, and practising in his own writings the accepted book-English of the south, he was yet thoroughly a Scot by his strongest personal and private affections. No Scot of his generation more fond of the antiquities and legends of his country, or more learned in that kind of lore; his chief pastime all through his life was in researches into Scottish records and family genealogies back to Malcolm Canmore and beyond; and his special recreation amid the troublesome party-pamphleteering of his later years was the composition of his _History of the Five Jameses_. This was not published till some years after his death, and, though of some interest as a specimen of the silvering effect of his ornate English upon very savage matters, is the poorest of all his writings in respect of real worth. But what of that other relic of Drummond, if it be really his, which did not come to light till thirty years after his decease, and then in the surprising form of a piece of broad Fifeshire farce in dog-Latin hexameters, entitled _Polemo-Middinia inter Vitarvam et Nebernam_,—_i.e._ “The Midden-Fecht between Tarvet and Newbarns”? If that really _is_ Drummond’s (which is possible, or even probable, though not absolutely certain), it is one excellent feather more in his cap. It would be proof positive that the stately and pensive Laird of Hawthornden was a typical Scot also, no less than Dunbar and Lindsay before him, or Burns after him, in the Scottish faculty of uproarious fun, and could give and take, when he chose, with any Newhaven fishwife, or any Gilmerton carter, in their own roughest vocabulary.

The tradition of Drummond has come down pretty vividly from his own time to the present. This, however, is perhaps less due to continued acquaintance with his writings than to certain aiding circumstances. Few names of literary celebrity, as Charles Lamb used to remark, are so delightful to pronounce as “Drummond of Hawthornden”; and in England, so far as Drummond has been kept in mind at all, it seems to have been chiefly by this conserving efficacy of his gracefully-sounding name. In Scotland, and especially in the vicinity of Edinburgh, the aids in recollecting him have been of a stronger kind:—

“Who knows not Melville’s beechy grove,
And Roslin’s rocky glen,
Dalkeith, which all the virtues love,
And classic Hawthornden?”

When Scott wrote these lines, ninety-one years ago, the reputation of the valley of the Esk for scenic beauty and picturesqueness, and the fashion of holiday peregrinations to it, on that account and on account of the attractions of its historical associations, by the citizens of Edinburgh or by tourists visiting Edinburgh, had already been fully formed. The reputation and the fashion have been kept up ever since, and Drummond’s memory has had the benefit. Whatever the other attractions of the valley of the Esk and its neighbourhood, the twin pre-eminence among them has belonged to Roslin and Hawthornden; and hence it has happened that hundreds and thousands who had never read a line of Drummond’s, and knew but vaguely in what century he lived, have looked admiringly at the cliff-socketed and quaintly gabled and turreted edifice, partly built by himself and partly of more ruinous antiquity, where he had his dwelling, have walked round it in the grounds where he once walked, have descended as he used to descend into the leafy dell of the river beneath, and so have taken into their minds some image of the man by the memory of whom the place has been consecrated.

Hawthornden is in the parish of Lasswade; and it is in the churchyard of Lasswade, two miles from the Hawthornden mansion, that one sees the bit of old masonry, called the Drummond Aisle, and once a portion of the church itself, within which is Drummond’s grave. Did he foresee that this would be his resting-place, or was he only writing metaphorically, when he penned the lines, now perhaps the most frequently quoted piece of his verse, giving instructions for his epitaph? His most intimate friend and correspondent through his life was Sir William Alexander of Menstrie, eventually Earl of Stirling and Secretary of State for Scotland,—one of those London Scots above mentioned who divided for a while with Drummond in London literary circles the palm of the primacy in Scoto-British poetry. There was no jealousy between them on that account; on the contrary, Alexander, as a man of high Court influence, regarded himself as standing in a relation of patronage to Drummond, while Drummond, acknowledging this relation, and proud of it, looked up to Alexander and admired him hugely. Their friendship, nevertheless, was as close and affectionate as ever bound two men together, and in their letters to each other they always, to signify this, called themselves, in the fashion of the pastoralists, Alexis and Damon. Well, it was in the year 1621, or thereabouts, that Drummond, then only about thirty-five years of age, but hardly recovered from a severe illness which had brought him to the doors of death and left him in a mood of melancholy depression, sent a sonnet to Alexander, containing these lines:—

“Amidst thy sacred cares and courtly toils,
Alexis, when thou shalt hear wandering fame
Tell death hath triumphed o’er my mortal spoils,
And that on earth I am but a sad name,
If thou e’er held me dear, by all our love,
By all that bliss, those joys, Heaven here us gave,
I conjure thee, and by the Maids of Jove,
To carve this short remembrance on my grave:—
‘Here Damon lies, whose songs did sometime grace
The murmuring Esk: may roses shade the place!’”

In the memorial to Drummond now proposed by the influential committee of which Lord Melville is chairman it is intended that this instruction shall be obeyed as faithfully as possible. The bushing of roses round the grave was but a wish, and a bushing of roses round the Drummond Aisle in Lasswade Churchyard is unfortunately not practicable in that situation. But there may be some decoration of the little aisle containing the grave; and on the wall, whether in the interior or outside, there may be a medallion of Drummond or other commemorative sculpture, with room for his own words of epitaph. That, most properly, is to be the first object, the primary object, of the committee that has been formed for the promotion of the memorial. Should the amount of the subscriptions, however, permit something more, the precise form of the addition may be matter for consideration. Should there be a bust or other piece of monumental sculpture besides that which is to decorate the sepulchre at Lasswade, surely Edinburgh is the place for that supplement, and, within Edinburgh, perhaps St. Giles’s Cathedral. For was not Drummond one of the earliest alumni of Edinburgh University; was not his donation of books to the University, which is still kept apart in the University Library under the name of The Drummond Collection, a special testimony of his regard and affection for the University in its infancy, and for the whole city; all through the years of his residence at Hawthornden must not the seven miles of road between Hawthornden and Edinburgh have been his most familiar ride or walk; every other week must he not have been actually in Edinburgh for hours and days together, visiting his Edinburgh relatives and friends, seen in colloquy with some of them on the causey of the old High Street near St. Giles’s Church, and known to have his favourite lounge in that street in the shop of Andro Hart, bookseller and publisher, just opposite the Cross?

Although the increase among us of late of the practice of such commemorative tributes to eminent personages of the past has provoked cynical criticism in some quarters, it is really one of the creditable signs of our time. The more numerous the objects of interest to any nation in its own history, or in history generally, in times preceding the bustle of the present, the richer the mind of that nation, and the higher its capabilities. Even the range of time to which it will go back for worthy objects of interest must count for something in the reckoning. The recent is only the departing present, and has so left its residues in the present, whether of admirations or of animosities, that participation in testimonies of regard for public men remembered as having recently moved amidst us signifies little more with many than sensitiveness to the common duties of present social life, or sometimes even of present political partisanship. To be susceptible of the commemorative instinct with respect to objects and persons removed from ourselves by a generation or two, or a century or two, is a rarer thing, and implies a larger and finer endowment of historical knowledge and feeling.

ALLAN RAMSAY[5]

In the reign of Queen Anne there were the stirrings of a literary revival in Scotland. No name connects itself more distinctly with this interesting phenomenon than that of Allan Ramsay.

Born in 1686, of humble parentage, in the village of Leadhills, in the wild inland parish of Crawfordmuir in Lanarkshire, and educated in the ordinary fashion at the parish school there, Ramsay was brought to Edinburgh in 1701, when he was in his fifteenth year, and was apprenticed to a periwig-maker. The statement sometimes made that he began life as a barber is therefore incorrect. The crafts of the barber and the wig-maker were then distinct. _Wig_ and _periwig_ are one and the same thing, and both are derived, it seems, though one would hardly suppose so, from the Latin _pilus_, hair. Thus,—Latin, _pilus_, hair; old Italian, _pilucca_, a mass of hair or head of hair; this, still in old Italian, corrupted into _perucca_; whence the French _perruque_; that word adopted into English, but generally twirled into _periwig_ to make it native; from which word _periwig_ if you lop off the _peri_, the sole remnant of the original _pilus_, you have the mere twirl or termination _wig_, standing as a substantive word and answering the whole purpose. Now a wig-maker, periwig-maker, or _perruquier_, was no mean tradesman in those old times, extending from the middle of the seventeenth century to near the end of the eighteenth, when it was the strange custom, in all civilised European countries, for people to wear artificial heads of hair, not as mere substitutes for the natural growths in cases of necessity (which had been a usage everywhere from time immemorial), but as fashionable adornments of bulging volume and fantastic device. An essay might be written on the fact that there was such a wig-wearing age in Europe, nearly the same in range of time in every country of that continent; in which essay it might be plausibly argued that there was an inherent congruity between the strange wig-wearing habit and the intellectual and spiritual characteristics, and consequently the literary capabilities and products, of the age distinguished by the habit. One can hardly conceive Addison or Dr. Johnson, for example, without a wig, or Wordsworth, or Byron, or Sir Walter Scott, with one.

Be that as it may,—and there are curious intricacies in the speculation,—Allan Ramsay not only belonged to the wig-wearing age in Scotland, but was brought up to the business of wig-making and wig-dressing for the Edinburgh lieges. It was no bad employment in a population of between 30,000 and 40,000 inhabitants, including resident noblemen and lairds, and a good many professional men and merchants, all of whom wore wigs, and liked them to be handsome. Accordingly, when, in or about the year 1708, or just after the Union, young Ramsay, having concluded his apprenticeship, started in business for himself, in some shop in the High Street, or one of its offshoots, his prospects were fair enough. Skipping four years, and coming to the year 1712, when he was twenty-five years of age, we find him just married to the daughter of a respectable Edinburgh lawyer, and in very comfortable circumstances otherwise. It was then that he was beginning to be known in the cosy society of old Edinburgh as not only an expert wig-maker but also something besides.

“Whenever fame, with voice of thunder,
Sets up a chield a warld’s wonder,
Either for slashing folk to dead,
Or having wind-mills in his head,
Or poet, or an airy beau,
Or ony twa-legged rary-show,
They wha have never seen’t are busy
To speer what-like a carlie is he.”

The words are Ramsay’s own, by way of preface in one of his poems to an account of his personal appearance and general character. The description, though not written till 1719, will do very well for 1712:—

“_Imprimis_, then, for tallness, I
Am five feet and four inches high;
A black-a-viced, snod, dapper, fallow,
Nor lean nor overlaid with tallow;
With phiz of a Morocco cut,
Resembling a late man of wit,
Auld-gabbit Spec., wha was sae cunning
To be a dummie ten years running.
Then, for the fabric of my mind,
’Tis mair to mirth than grief inclined:
I rather choose to laugh at folly
Than show dislike by melancholy,
Well judging a sour heavy face
Is not the truest mark of grace.”

Elsewhere, more briefly, he describes himself as

“A little man that lo’es my ease,”

and again as one who much enjoyed, in good company,

“An evening and guffaw.”

This kind of pleasure he was in the habit of enjoying more particularly in one of those many clubs into which the citizens of dense Auld Reekie then distributed themselves for the purposes of conviviality. It consisted of about a dozen kindred spirits calling themselves “The Easy Club,” professing literary tastes, and making it a rule that each of them should be known within the club by some adopted name of literary associations. Ramsay’s first club-name was “Isaac Bickerstaff,” but he changed it after a while for “Gavin Douglas.” There is a significance in both names, and in the exchange of the one for the other.

Through Ramsay’s apprenticeship, and also after he had set up in business for himself, he had been a diligent reader of all accessible books. Recollecting what books _were_ then accessible to one in his circumstances, we can see, however, that his readings had been mainly in two directions. In the first place, there was the current English or London literature of his own time, or as much of it as was wafted to Edinburgh in the shape of the last or recent publications, in prose or verse, by Defoe, Prior, Swift, Steele, Colley Cibber, Addison, Rowe, Aaron Hill, Gay, and others of the Queen Anne wits; among whom is not to be forgotten the youthful Pope, then rising to the place of poetic supremacy that had been left vacant by Dryden. Of Ramsay’s cognisance of this contemporary English literature of the south, his admiration of it, and enjoyment of it, there is abundant evidence. He had become aware, however, of another literature, indigenous to his own Scotland, though lying far back, for the most part, in an obscure Scottish past. Through Watson’s _Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems_, Ruddiman’s edition of Gavin Douglas’s _Translation of Virgil_, and Sage’s edition of Drummond of Hawthornden, he had been attracted to the old Scottish poets, finding in them a richness of antique matter that came home to his heart amid all his readings in Steele, Pope, and Addison:—

“The chiels of London, Cam., and Ox.,
Hae raised up great poetic stocks
Of _Rapes_, of _Buckets_, _Sarks_, and _Locks_,
While we neglect
To shaw their betters. This provokes
Me to reflect

On the learn’d days of Gawn Dunkell:
Our country then a tale could tell;
Europe had nane mair snack and snell
At verse or prose;
Our Kings were poets too themsell,
Bauld and jocose.”

In this double direction of Ramsay’s literary likings,—his respectful obeisance to the literary merits of his London contemporaries, and his fonder private affection for the old poets of his Scottish vernacular,—we have the key to his own literary life.