Chapter IV: The Empress of the North (1)

I suppose the Scotsman who has been born in Edinburgh may have a pardonable reluctance in praising the town, may hesitate in appraising it; Stevenson did; Scott did not. And I suppose if one cannot trace his ancestry back to Edinburgh, or nearly there, but must choose some of the other capitals of the world as his ancestral city, one might begrudge estate to Edinburgh.

I have none of these hesitations, am hampered by none of these half and half ways. Being an American, with half a dozen European capitals to choose from if I must, and having been born in an American capital which is among the loveliest--I think the loveliest--I dare choose Edinburgh as my dream city. I dare fling away my other capital claims, and all modification, ever Scotch moderation, to declare without an "I think" or "they say," Edinburgh is the most beautiful, the most romantic, the singular city of the world.

Those who come out of many generations of migration grow accustomed to choosing their quarter of the world; they have come from many countries and through nomadic ancestors for a century, or two, or three. And perhaps they, themselves, have migrated from one state to another, one city to another. Every American has had these phases, has suffered the sea change and the land. Surely then he may adopt his ancestral capital, as correctly as he adopts his present political capital.

It shall be Edinburgh. And while Constantinople and Rio and Yokohama may be splendid for situation, they have always something of foreign about them, they can never seem to touch our own proper romance, to have been the setting for our play. Edinburgh is as lovely, and then, the chalice of romance has been lifted for centuries on the high altar of her situation.

Edinburgh is a small city, as modern cities go; but I presume it has many thousands of population, hundreds of thousands. If it were Glasgow numbers would be important, fixative. But Edinburgh has had such a population through the centuries that to cast its total with only that of the souls now living within her precincts were to leave out of the picture those shadowy and yet brilliant, ever present generations, who seem all to jostle each other on her High street, without respect to generations, if there is very decided respect of simple toward gentle.

Edinburgh is, curiously, significantly, divided and scarce united, into Old Town and New Town. And yet, the Old Town with its ancient _lands_ so marvelously like modern tenements, and its poverty which is of no date and therefore no responsibility of ours, is neither dead nor deserted, and is still fully one-half the town. While New Town, looking ever up to the old, looking across the stretch to Leith, and to the sea whence came so much threatening in the old days, and with its memories of Hume and Scott who are ancient, and of Stevenson, who, in spite of his immortal youth, does begin to belong to another generation than ours--New Town also, to a new American, is something old. It has all become Edinburgh, two perfect halves of a whole which is not less perfect for the imperfect uniting.

There is no city which can be so "observed." I venture that when you have stood on Castle Hill--on the High Street with its narrow opening between the _lands_ framing near and far pictures--on Calton Hill--when you have been able to "rest and be thankful" at Corstorphine Hill--when you have climbed the Salisbury crags--when you have mounted to Arthur's Seat and looked down as did King Arthur before there was an Edinburgh--you will believe that not any slightest corner but fills the eye and soul.

There is, of course, no single object in Edinburgh to compare with objects of traveler's interest farther south. The castle is not the Tower, Holyrood is a memory beside Windsor, St. Giles is no Canterbury, St. Mary's is not St. Paul's, the Royal Scottish art gallery is meager indeed, notwithstanding certain rare riches in comparison with the National. But still one may believe of any of these superior objects, as T. Sandys retorted to Shovel when they had played the game of matching the splendours of Thrums with those of London and Shovel had named Saint Paul's, and Tommy's list of native wonders was exhausted, but never Tommy--"it would like to be in Thrums!" All these lesser glories go to make up the singular glory which is Edinburgh.

_The Castle_

And there is the castle. Nowhere in all the world is castle more strategically set to guard the city and to guard the memories of the city and the beauty.

For the castle is Edinburgh. It stood there, stalwart in the plain, thousands and thousands of years ago, this castle hill which invited a castle as soon as man began to fortify himself. It has stood here a thousand years as the bulwark of man against man. Certain it will stand there a thousand years to come. And after--after man has destroyed and been destroyed, or when he determines that like night and the sea there shall be no more destruction. Castle Hill is immortal.

Always it has been the resort of kings and princes. First it was the keep of princesses, far back in Pictish days before Christian time, this "Castell of the Maydens." From 987 B. C. down to 1566, when Mary was lodged here for safe keeping in order that James might be born safe and royal, the castle has had royalties in its keeping. It has kept them rather badly in truth. While many kings have been born here, few kings have died in its security; almost all Scottish kings have died tragically, almost all Scottish kings have died young, and left their kingdom to some small prince whose regents held him in this castle for personal security, while they governed the realm, always to its disaster.

There is not one of the Stewart kings, one of the Jameses, from First to Sixth, who did not come into the heritage of the kingdom as a baby, a youth; even the Fourth, who rebelled against his father and won the kingdom--and wore a chain around his body secretly for penance. And these baby kings and stripling princes have been lodged in the castle for safe keeping, prologues to the swelling act of the imperial theme.

History which attempts to be exact begins the castle in the seventh century, when Edwin of Deira fortified the place and called it Edwin's burgh. It was held by Malcolm Canmore, of whom and of his Saxon queen Margaret, Dunfermline tells a fuller story; held against rebels and against English, until Malcolm fell at Alnwick, and Margaret, dead at hearing the news, was carried secretly out of the castle by her devoted and kingly sons.

After Edward I took the castle, for half a century it was variously held by the English as a Border fortress. Once Bruce retook it, a stealthy night assault, up the cliffs of the west, and The Bruce razed it. Rebuilt by the Third Edward, it was taken from this king by a clever ruse planned by the Douglass, Black Knight of Liddesdale. A shipload of wine and biscuits came into harbour, and the unsuspecting castellan, glad to get such precious food in the far north, purchased it all and granted delivery at dawn next morning. The first cart load upset under the portcullis, the gate could not be closed, the cry "A Douglass," was raised, and the castle entered into Scottish keeping, never to be "English" again until the Act of Union.

Henry IV and Richard II attempted it, but failed. Richard III entered it as friend. For three years it was held for Mary by Kirkcaldy, while the city was disloyal. Charles I held it longer than he held England, and Cromwell claimed it in person as part of the Protectorate. Prince Charles, the Third, could not take it, contented himself with the less castellated, more palatial joys, of Holyrood; a preference he shared with his greatest grandmother.

To-day perhaps its defense might be battered down, as some one has suggested, "from the Firth by a Japanese cruiser." But it looks like a Gibraltar, and it keeps impregnably the treasures of the past; as necessary a defense, I take it, as of any material treasure of the present.

If you are a king you must wait to enter; summons must be made to the Warder, and it must be certain you are the king; even Edward VII, most Stewart of recent kings had to prove himself not Edward I, not English, but "Union." If you are a commoner you know no such difficulties.

First you linger on the broad Esplanade where a regiment in kilts is drilling, perhaps the Black Watch, the Scots Greys. No doubt of late it has been tramped by regiments of the "First Hundred Thousand" and later, in training for the wars.

As an American you linger here in longer memory. For when Charles was king--the phrase sounds recent to one who is eternally Jacobite--this level space was a part of Nova Scotia, and the Scotsmen who were made nobles with estates in New Scotland were enfeoffed on this very ground. So close were the relations between old and new, so indifferent were the men of adventuring times toward space.

Or, you linger here to recall when Cromwell was burned in effigy, along with "his friend the Devil."

You pass through the gate, where no wine casks block the descent of the portcullis, and the castle is entered. There are three or four points of particular interest.

Queen Margaret's chapel, the oldest and smallest religious house in Scotland, a tiny place indeed, where Margaret was praying when word was brought of the death of Malcolm in battle, and she, loyal and royal soul, died the very night while the enemies from the Highlands, like an army of Macbeth's, surrounded the castle. The place is quite authentic, Saxon in character with Norman touches. I know no place where a thousand years can be so swept away, and Saxon Margaret herself seems to kneel in the perpetual dim twilight before the chancel.

There is Mons Meg, a monstrous gun indeed, pointing its mouth toward the Forth, as though it were the guardian of Scotland. A very pretentious gun, which was forged for James II, traveled to the sieges of Dumbarton and of Norham, lifted voice in salute to Mary in France on her marriage to the Dauphin, was captured by Cromwell and listed as "the great iron murderer, Muckle Meg," and "split its throat" in saluting the Duke of York in 1682, a most Jacobite act of loyalty. After the Rising of the Forty Five this gun was taken to London, as though to take it from Scotland were to take the defense from Jacobitism. But Sir Walter Scott, restoring Scotland, and being in much favour with George IV, secured the return of Mons Meg. It was as though a prince of the realm has returned. Now, the great gun, large enough to shoot men for ammunition, looks, silently but sinisterly, out over the North Sea.

History comes crowding its events in memory when one enters Old Parliament Hall. It is fitly ancestral, a noble hall with an open timbered roof of great dignity, with a collection of armour and equipment that particularly re-equips the past. And in this hall, under this roof, what splendour, what crime! Most criminal, the "black dinner" given to the Black Douglasses to their death. Unless one should resent the dinner given by Leslie to Cromwell, when there was no black bull's head served.

By a secret stair, which commoners and Jacobites may use to-day, communication was had with the Royal Lodgings, and often must Queen Mary have gone up and down those stairs, carrying the tumult of her heart, the perplexity of her kingdom; for Mary was both woman and sovereign.

The Royal Lodgings contain Queen Mary's Rooms, chiefly; the other rooms are negligible. It is a tiny bedchamber, too small to house the eager soul of Mary, but very well spaced for the niggard soul of James. One merely accepts historically the presence of Mary here; there is too much intertwining of "H" and "M." No Jacobite but divorces Darnley from Mary, even though he would not effect divorce with gunpowder. King James I, when he returned fourteen years after to the place where he was VI, made a pilgrimage to his own birth-room on June 19, 1617. I suppose he found the narrow space like unto the Majesty that doth hedge a king.

Mary must have beat her heart against these walls as an eagle beats wings against his cage. She never loved the place. Who could love it who must live in it? It was royally hung; she made it fit for living, with carpets from Turkey, chairs and tables from France, gold hangings that were truly gold for the bed, and many tapestries with which to shut out the cold--eight pictures of the Judgment of Paris; four pictures of the Triumph of Virtue!

Here she kept her library, one hundred and fifty-three precious volumes--where are they now? "The Queen readeth daily after her dinner," wrote Randolph, English envoy, to his queen, "instructed by a learned man, Mr. George Buchanan, somewhat of Lyvie."

And I wondered if here she wrote that Prayer which but the other day I came upon in the bookshop of James Thin, copied into a book of a hundred years back, in a handwriting that has something of Queen Mary's quality in it--

"O Domine Deus!
Speravi in te;
O care mi Iesu!
Nunc libera me:
In dura catena,
In misera poena
Desidero te;
Languendo, gemendo,
Et genuflectendo
Adoro, imploro,
Ut liberes me!"

Her windows looked down across the city toward Holyrood. Almost she must have heard John Knox thunder in the pulpit of St. Giles, and thunder against her. And, directly beneath far down she saw the Grassmarket. Sometimes it flashed with gay tournament folk; for before and during Mary's time all the world came to measure lances in Edinburgh. Sometimes it swarmed with folk come to watch an execution; in the next century it was filled in the "Killing Time," with Covenanter mob applauding the execution of Royalists, with Royalist mob applauding the execution of Covenanters; Mary's time was not the one "to glorify God in the Grassmarket."

At the top of the market, near where the West Bow leads up to the castle, was the house of Claverhouse, who watched the killings. At the bottom of the market was the West Port through which Bonnie Dundee rode away.

"To the Lords of Convention, 'twas Claverhouse spoke,
Ere the king's crown go down there are crowns to be broke,
So each cavalier who loves honour and me,
Let him follow the bonnet of Bonnie Dundee.
Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can,
Come saddle my horses and call up my men,
Fling all your gates open, and let me gae free,
For 'tis up with the bonnets of Bonnie Dundee."

And to-day, but especially on Saturday nights, if you care to take your life, or your peace in hand, you can join a strange and rather awful multitude as it swarms through the Grassmarket, more and more drunken as midnight comes on, and not less or more drunken than the mob which hanged Captain Porteous.

It is a decided relief to look down and find the White Hart Inn, still an inn, where Dorothy and William Wordsworth lodged, on Thursday night, September 15, 1803--"It was not noisy, and tolerably cheap. Drank tea, and walked up to the Castle."

The Cowgate was a fashionable suburb in Mary's time. A canon of St. Andrews wrote in 1530, "nothing is humble or lowly, everything magnificent." On a certain golden gray afternoon I had climbed to Arthur's Seat to see the city through the veil of mist--

"I saw rain falling and the rainbow drawn
On Lammermuir. Harkening I heard again
In my precipitous city beaten bells
Winnow the keen sea wind."

It was late, gathering dusk and rain, when I reached the level and thinking to make a short cut--this was once the short cut to St. Cuthbert's from Holyrood--I ventured into the Cowgate, and wondered at my own temerity. Stevenson reports, "One night I went along the Cowgate after every one was a-bed but the policeman." Well, if Scott liked to "put a cocked hat on a story," Stevenson liked to put it on his own adventures. The Cowgate, in dusk rain, is adventure enough.

Across the height lies Greyfriar's. The church is negligible, the view from there superb, the place historic. One year after Jenny Geddes threw her stool in St. Giles and started the Reformation--doesn't it sound like Mrs. O'Leary's cow?--the Covenant was signed (Feb. 28, 1638) on top of a tomb still shown, hundreds pressing to the signing, some signing with their blood. The Reformation was on, not to be stopped until all Scotland was harried and remade.

I like best to think that in this churchyard, on a rainy Sunday, Scott met a charming girl, fell in love with her, took her home under his umbrella, and, did not marry her--his own romance!

Because no king shall ever wear the crown again, nor wave the scepter, nor wield the sword of state, the Regalia, housed in the Crown Room, and guarded from commoner and king by massive iron grating, is more interesting than any other appanage of royalty in the world. The crown which was worn by Bruce, and which sat rather uneasily on the very unsteady head of Charles II at what time he was crowned at Scone and was scolded, is of pure gold and much bejeweled. The scepter, made in Paris for James V, carries a beryl, come from Egypt three thousand years ago, or, from a Druid priest in the mist of time. The sword was a gift from Pope Julius to James IV; in those days the Scottish sovereign was surely the "Most Catholic Majesty."

England has no ancient regalia; hers were thrown into the melting pot by Cromwell. The Protector--and Destructor--would fain have grasped these "Honours," but they were spirited away, and later concealed in the castle. Here they remained a hundred and ten years, sealed in a great oak chest. The rumour increased that they had gone to England. And finally Sir Walter Scott secured an order from George IV to open the chest (Feb. 4, 1818).

It was a tremendous moment to Scott. Could he restore the Honours as well as the country? There they lay, crown of The Bruce, scepter of James V, sword of Pope and King. The castle guns thundered--how Mons Meg must have regretted her lost voice!

And still we can hear the voice of Scott, when a commissioner playfully lifted the crown as if to place it on the head of a young lady near--"No, by God, no!" Never again shall this crown rest on any head. That is assured in a codicil to the Act of Union. And--it may be that other crowns shall in like manner gain a significance when they no longer rest on uneasy heads.

The view from the King's bastion is royal. Where is there its superior? And only its rival from Calton Hill, from Arthur's Seat. The Gardens lie below, the New Town spreads out, the city runs down to Leith, the Firth shines and carries on its bosom the Inchkeith and the May; the hills of Fife rampart the North; the Highlands with Ben Lomond for sentinel form the purple West; and south are the Braid hills and the heathery Pentlands--the guide has pointed through a gap in the castle wall to the hills and to the cottage at Swanston.

"City of mists and rain and blown gray spaces,
Dashed with the wild wet colour and gleam of tears,
Dreaming in Holyrood halls of the passionate faces
Lifted to one Queen's face that has conquered the years.
Are not the halls of thy memory haunted places?
Cometh there not as a moon (where blood-rust sears
Floors a-flutter of old with silks and laces)
Gilding a ghostly Queen thro' the mist of tears?

"Proudly here, with a loftier pinnacled splendour
Throned in his northern Athens, what spells remain
Still on the marble lips of the Wizard, and render
Silent the gazer on glory without a stain!
Here and here, do we whisper with hearts more tender,
Tusitala wandered thro' mist and rain;
Rainbow-eyes and frail and gallant and slender,
Dreaming of pirate isles in a jeweled main.

"Up the Canongate climbeth, cleft a-sunder
Raggedly here, with a glimpse of the distant sea,
Flashed through a crumbling alley, a glimpse of wonder,
Nay, for the City is throned in Eternity!
Hark! from the soaring castle a cannon's thunder
Closeth an hour for the world and an æon for me,
Gazing at last from the martial heights whereunder
Deathless memories roll to an ageless sea."

_High Street_

If the Baedeker with a cautious reservation, declares Princes Street "Perhaps" the handsomest in Europe, there is no reservation in the guide-book report of Taylor, the "Water Poet," who wrote of the High Street in the early Sixteen Hundreds, "the fairest and goodliest streete that ever my eyes beheld." Surely it was then the most impressive street in the world. Who can escape a sharp impression to-day? It was then the most curious street in the world, and it has lost none of its power to evoke wonder.

A causeway between the castle and Holyrood, a steep ridge lying between the Nor' Loch (where now are the Princes' Gardens) and the Sou' Loch (where now are the Meadows, suburban dwelling) the old height offered the first refuge to those who would fain live under the shadow of the castle. As the castle became more and more the center of the kingdom, dwelling under its shadow became more and more important, if not secure. The mightiest lords of the kingdom built themselves town houses along the causeway. French influence was always strong, and particularly in architecture. So these tall _lands_ rose on either side of the long street, their high, many-storied fronts on the High Street, their many more storied backs toward the Lochs. They were, in truth, part of the defense of the town; from their tall stories the enemy, especially the "auld enemy," could be espied almost as soon as from the castle. And the closes, the wynds, those dark tortuous alleys which lead between, and which to-day in their squalor are the most picturesque corners of all Europe, were in themselves means of defense in the old days when cannon were as often of leather as of iron, and guns were new and were little more reaching than arrows, and bludgeons and skene dhus and fists were the final effective weapon when assault was intended to the city.

The ridge divides itself into the Lawnmarket, the High Street, and the Canongate; St. Giles uniting the first two, and the Netherbow port, now removed, dividing the last two.

The Lawnmarket in the old days was near-royal, and within its houses the great nobles lodged, and royalty was often a guest, or a secret guest. The High Street was the business street, centering the life of the city, its trade, its feuds--"a la maniére d'Edimborg" ran the continental saying of fights--its religion, its executions, its burials. The Canongate, outside the city proper and outside the Flodden wall and within the precincts of Holyrood, therefore regarded as under the protection of Holy Church, became the aristocratic quarters of the later Stewarts, of the wealthy nobles of the later day.

I suppose one may spend a lifetime in Edinburgh, with frequent days in the Old Town, wandering the High Street, with the eye never wearying, always discovering the new. And I suppose it would take a lifetime, born in Old Town and of Old Town, to really know the quarter. I am not certain I should care to spend a lifetime here; but I have never and shall never spend sufficient of this life here. It is unsavoury of course; it is slattern, it is squalid, danger lurks in the wynds and drunkenness spreads itself in the closes. If the old warning cry of "Gardey loo!" is no longer heard at ten o' the night, one still has need of the answering "Haud yer hand!" or, your nose. Dr. Samuel Johnson, walking this street on his first night in Edinburgh, arm in arm with Boswell, declared, "I can smell you in the dark!" No sensitive visitor will fail to echo him to-day. There are drains and sewers, there is modern sanitation in old Edinburgh. But the habits of the centuries are not easily overcome; and the Old Town still smells as though with all the old aroma of the far years. Still, it is high, it is wind-swept--and what of Venice, what of the Latin Quarter, what of Mile End, what of the East Side?

But there is still splendour and power, bequeathed as Taylor said, "from antiquitie to posteritie," in spite of the decline and the decay. If the palace of Mary of Lorraine on Castle Hill is fallen and the doorways are in the Museum--Mary who was mother to Mary Queen, and contemporary worthy to Catherine of Medici--there are still, at the end of the long street, Moray House and Queensberry House. Moray is where Cromwell lodged in 1648, and gave no hint of what was coming in 1649; if he had, history might have been different; to-day Moray House is the United Free Church Training college! Queensberry House is where lived those Queensberry marquises of fighting and sporting renown, and where the Marquis lived who forced through the Act of Union--"There ended an old song"; and now it is the Refuge for the Destitute!

There is still beauty shining through the dust and the cobwebs; here a doorway with bold insignia and exquisite carving, leading to--nowhere; here a bit of painting, Norrie's perhaps, or a remnant of timbered ceiling; and everywhere, now as then--more now than then, since sanitary destruction has had its way here and there--glimpses of the city and the moors and the mountains.

It is invidious to compare, to choose from these closes. Each has its history, its old habitations, its old associations, its particular picturesqueness; Lady Stair's, Baxter's, Byer's, Old Stamp Office, White Horse, and many more.

Through this street what glory that was Scotland has not passed and what degradation, what power has not been displayed and what abasement? To see it now, filled with people and with marching troops in honour of the visiting king, is to get back a little of ancient history, of greater glory. It lends itself to such majesty, dull and deserted as it is for the most part.

When the King came to Edinburgh following on his coronation, making a pilgrimage of his realm, he came to St. Giles, as has come every sovereign of Scotland, from Malcolm who may have worshiped in the Culdee church, to George in whose honour the chapel of the Thistle and the Rose was unveiled.

"For noo, unfaithfu' to the Lord
Auld Scotland joins the rebel horde;
Her human hymn-books on the board
She noo displays,
An' Embro Hie Kirk's been restored
In popish ways."

On a Sunday morning I hurried to St. Giles to see the trooping of the colours. (Later, listening to Dr. White, in a recently built reformed church on Princes Street, I heard a sermon from the text, "You shall see the king in all his beauty." But, no mention of King George! It was even as it was in the old days.)

In truth it was a brave sight to find the High Street thronged with people, and the regiments marching down from St. Giles to Holyrood. The king did not enter town till next day. (I saw, with some resentment, over the door of a public house, the motto, "Will ye no come back again?") But, somehow, so many kings gone on, the play was rather better staged with the sovereign not there. I learned then how gorgeous the old days must have been with their colour and glitter and flash.

I suppose there was a tall _land_ where in my day stood and still stands Hogg's hotel, just above the Tron Kirk; the _lands_ on the south side the High burned a century ago. But, to the American gazing down on ancient memories and present sovereignties, there was a wonderful courtesy shown by the hotel. I had interrupted their quiet Sabbath; it can still be quiet in Edinburgh notwithstanding that a tram car carried me on my way hither. The dining-room of this hotel looked out on the High, and it was breakfast time for these covenanting-looking guests from the countryside. But I, an invader, was made welcome and given the best seat on the balcony; a stranger and they took me in. Sometime I shall take up residence in this Latin Quarter, and if not in Lady Stair's Close, then in Hogg's hotel. The name sounds sweeter if you have just come up from Ettrick.

Nor did I miss the King. For

"I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
Who cry'd--'La Belle Dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!'"

It was the Belle Dame, it was the Queen, I saw most often on the High Street, riding to and fro from the time of the "haar" on her return from France, till that last terrible night and the ride to Loch Leven.

After that you may visit the John Knox house if you will, and read for your edification its motto. "Lyfe God aboune al and yi nicht-bour as yi Self," and buy a book or two in its book shop. I took particular pleasure in buying a girlish picture of Mary Queen, and a book of the poems of Robert Fergusson, neither of which would have pleasured John.

After that you may look at the "I. K." in the pavement, and realize that Dr. Johnson's wish for Knox has been fulfilled--"I hope in the highway."

After that you may look on the heart stamped in the pavement near St. Giles, where once stood the Heart of Midlothian, the Old Tolbooth.

There is only one other memory of High Street and of Scotland that for me equals that of Mary. It is Montrose. Up the Canongate comes the rumbling of a tumbril, like the French Revolution. And out of the high _lands_ there look the hundreds of Covenanting folk, triumphant for the moment. And on the balcony of Moray House, within which the marriage of Lady Mary Stewart to the Marquis of Lorne has just been celebrated, there stands the wedding party, and among them the Earl of Argyle. Up the street comes the cart. And within it clad like a bridegroom--"fyne scarlet coat to his knee, trimmed with silver galoons, lined with taffeta, roses in his shoon, and stockings of incarnet silk"--stands the Marquis of Montrose, the loyalest Scotsman that ever lived.

After the field of Kylsyth, after the field of Philipshaugh, and the flight to the North and the betrayal, he has been brought back to Edinburgh, to a swift and covenanting sentence, and to death at the Tron.

His eyes meet proudly those of Argyle who has deserted his king and who thinks to stand in with the Covenant and with the future. It is the eyes of Argyle which drop. And Montrose goes on.

His head is on the picket of the Netherbow Port. His four quarters are sent to the four corners of the kingdom, Glasgow, Perth, Aberdeen, Inverness.

But the end is not yet. The tables turn, as they turned so often in those unstable times. It is Argyle who goes to the scaffold. Charles is king, the Second Charles. There is an edict. The body of Montrose is dug up out of the Boroughmoor. It is buried in Holyrood. The four quarters are reassembled from Glasgow and Perth and Aberdeen and Inverness. A procession fairly royal moves from Holyrood to St. Giles. At the Netherbow it pauses. The head is taken down from the pike. The body of Montrose is whole again. An honourable burial takes place in the cathedral sanctuary.

Even though when search was made at the restoring of the church and the erection of the effigy the remains could not be found, there has been that justification by procession and by faith, that justification of loyalty that we remember when we remember Montrose--

"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch,
To gain or lose it all."

_Holyrood_

Holyrood, ruined as it is, empty as it is, spurious as it is, still can house the Stewarts. Nowhere else are they so completely and splendidly Stewart. It is the royalest race which ever played at being sovereign; in sharp contrast with the heavier, more successful Tudors; crafty but less crafty than the Medici; amorous but more loyal than the Bourbons.

Never did kings claim sovereignty through a more divine right--and only one (whisper sometimes intimates that he was not Stewart, but substitute; but he left a Stewart descent) failed to pay the penalty for such assertion. It was the splendour which was Stewart while they lived, the tragedy that was Stewart when they came to die, which makes them the royal race.

There were born in Holyrood not one of them, unless it be James V. But almost all of them were married in Holyrood, held here their festive days, and, not one of them died in Holyrood. It is their life, the vivid intense flash of it, across those times that seem mysterious, even legendary in remembered times north of the Border. Life was a holiday to each of the Stewarts, and he spent it in the palace and in the pleasance of Holyrood.

The Abbey, with the monastery which was attached to it, begins far back before the Stewarts. It was founded by David I, the abbey-builder. Legend has it that he went a-hunting on a holy day, and straying from the "noys and dyn of Bugillis," a white stag came against him. David thought to defend himself, but a hand bearing a cross came out of the cloud, and the stag was exorcised. David kept the cross. In dream that night within the castle he was commanded to build an abbey where he had been saved, and the hunting place being this scant mile and a quarter from the castle--then a forest where now it is treeless--David placed this convenient abbey where it has stood for six centuries, defying fire and war and reformation, until the citizens of Edinburgh ravaged it when the roof fell in in the middle of the eighteenth century.

There is a curious feeling when one crosses the Girth stones at the lower end of the Canongate. It is a century and more since this was sanctuary. But it is impossible to step across these stones, into the "Liberty of Holyrood," and not wonder if there may not perhaps be some need in your own soul of sanctuary. Thousands and thousands of men--"abbey lairds" as they were pleasantly called--have stepped across this line before me, through the centuries. Who am I to be different, unneedful? May I not need inviolate sanctuary? May it not be that at my heels dogs some sinister creditor who will seize me by the skirts before I reach the boundary beyond which there is no exacting for debt? A marvelous thing, this ancient idea of sanctuary. It made an oasis of safety in a savage world. Surely it was super-christian. And here, at Holyrood, as the medieval statute declares, "qukilk privelege has bene inviolabie observit to all maner of personis cuman wythin the boundes ... past memorie of man." What has the modern world given itself in place of ancient sanctuary? Justice, I suppose, and a jury trial.

But, once across the Girth, one becomes, not a sanctuarian, but a Stewart.

The situation is a little dreary, a little flat. And the palace, as a palace, is altogether uninteresting to look on. It is not the building of David or of the earlier Stewarts. But of that Merry Monarch who harboured so long in France, when England was determining whether it would be royal or republican, and Scotland was determining whether it would be covenanted or uncovenanted. The Merry Monarch was ever an uncovenanted person, not at all Scottish, although somewhat like the errant James--whose errancy was of his own choosing. Charles had acquired a French taste at the court of his cousin, Louis the Grand. So the new Holyrood was built in French baronial style. And no monarch has ever cared to inhabit it for any length of time. Only King Edward VII, who would have been a happy successor to James, but Edward was very studious in those days of 1859, when he lodged here and studied under the direction of the Rector of the Royal High School. Still I can but think that it was in this Stewart place that Edward developed his Stewartship.

There is not a stone to speak of the magnificence, of the strength, of David. The Abbey was burned and burned again, by Edward and Richard the Second, and entirely rebuilt when the Stewarts were beginning to be splendid and assured. Over the west doorway, high-arched and deep-recessed, early English in its technique, Charles I, who was crowned here in 1633, caused the stone to be placed.

"He shall build ane House for my name and I will stablish the
throne of his kingdom forever."

The tablet still stands above the doorway. But Charles is lying for his sins in a vault at St. George's chapel at Windsor far in the south, having paid his penalty on the scaffold in Whitehall. And the House is in ruins, "bare ruined choir," where not even "the late birds sing." Although Mendelssohn in speaking of the impression the Abbey made on him, does say, "I think I found there the beginnings of my Scotch symphony."

This "magnificent Abbey-Kirk of Halirude" was no doubt very splendid; although in architectural beauty it cannot compare with Melrose, not even the great east window with its rich quatrefoil tracing. But what scenes have been staged in that historic drama, that theatrical piece, we call the history of the Stewarts!

Before the high altar, under that east window, when James I was kneeling before God in prayer, there appeared the Lord of the Isles, come repentant from burning Inverness and other rebellion, to kneel before the king, his own sword pointed at his breast.

Before this altar James II was married to Mary of Gueldres. James III was married to Margaret of Denmark, who brought the Orkneys as her dower. James IV was married to Margaret Tudor, the union of the "Thistle and the Rose." James V was not married here, he went to France for his frail bride, Magdalene, who lived but seven weeks in this inhospitable land, this hospitable Holyrood. She was buried in Holyrood chapel, only to be dug up and tossed about as common clay when the Edinburgh citizens made football of royal skulls.

The two sons of James VI, Henry who should have been king and who might have united royalist and commoner had fate granted it, and Charles who was to become king, were both christened here. James VII, brother to Charles II, restored this Chapel Royal and prepared it for the Roman ritual. James VIII was never here, or but as a baby. Charles III--did the Bonnie Prince in that brief brilliant Edinburgh moment of his, ever kneel before this then deserted altar and ask divine favour while he reasserted the divine right of kings?

Here--or was it secretly, in Stirling?--the Queen--one says The Queen and all the world knows--gowned in black velvet, at five o'clock on a July morning, was married to her young cousin, Henry Darnley. A marriage that endured two long terrible tumultuous years.

Here--or was it in the drawing-room?--at two o'clock on a May morning, the Queen was married to Bothwell, by Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney, not with mass as she had been wed to her boy-cousin, but with preaching as she wed the Bishop's cousin. And "at this marriage there was neither pleasure nor pastime used as use was wont to be used when princes were married." So says the Diurnal Occurents of Scotland. A marriage that endured a brief, perhaps happy, tragedy-gathering month.

And the Queen beautiful was destroyed, by the Reformation, like an Abbey.

The bones of Darnley were ravaged by the citizens of Edinburgh out of the ruins of this chapel. Or were they carried to Westminster by that unroyal son who was so laggard in caring for the remains of his queenly mother? I hope that Darnley does not rest beside her. For I think those exquisite marble fingers of the effigy in Henry VII's chapel, looking I fain believe as those of Mary looked, tapering, lovely, sinister, would not so fold themselves in prayer without unfolding through the long centuries.

In the old palace the most glorious days were those when James IV was king. As the most glorious days of Scotland were those which are almost legendary. The palace still had the grandeur that was Norman and the grace that was early English under David. Its front, towered and pinnacled, suggesting more fortress security than this dull château, opened upon a great outer court that lay between the palace and the walls. Coming down the Canongate from the castle it must have looked very splendid to James. And yet he did not care to remain in it long. All the Stewarts had errant souls, and they loved to wander their kingdom through. It presented ample opportunity for adventure; scarce a Stewart ever left Scotland. That last Prince, who flashed across Scotland in one last Stewart sword thrust--"My friends," he said in Holyrood the night before Prestonpans, "I have thrown away the scabbard"--was but treading in the steps of his royal forebears, the royal fore-errants.

In the days of James IV--we say it as one should say in the days of Haroun al Raschid, and indeed Edinburgh was in those early years of the Fifteen Hundreds the Bagdad of the world, and her days as well as her nights were truly Arabian--the world must have looked much as it does on the pleasant morning when we make our royal entry into Holyrood.

The Abbey grounds, a regal area then, and still a regality, were rich with woodland and orchard, and terraced and flowered into southern beauty. The red crags of the Salisbury ridge rose bold above as they do to-day, and crowning the scene the leonine form of Arthur's Seat above the green slopes, the lion keeping guard against the invading lion of England! I think James must often have climbed to that height to look forth over his domain, over his city, to watch the world, as King Arthur--whom he did not resemble--did legendary centuries before.

It was a busy time in Edinburgh; men's hands and wits were working. In Leith, then as now the port, then as now a separate burgh, there was much shipping and much building of ships; King James dreamed of a navy, and he had an admirable admiral in Sir Anthony Wood. In the castle there was the forging of guns, the "seven sisters of Brothwick," under direction of the king's master gunner, while Mons Meg looked on, and perhaps saw the near terrible future when these sisters of hers should be lost at Flodden.

In the city there was the splendid beginning of that intellectual life which has ever been quick in Edinburgh. It was a joyous time; witness the account from the lord High treasurer--

"On the 11th of February, 1488, we find the king bestowing nine pounds on gentil John, the English fule; on the 10th of June we have an item to English pipers who played to the king at the castle gate, of eight pounds eight shillings; on the thirty-first of August Patrick Johnson and his fellows, that playit a play to the king, in Lithgow, receives three pounds; Jacob the lutar, the king of bene, Swanky that brought balls to the king, twa wemen that sang to his highness, Witherspoon the foular, that told tales and brought fowls, Tom Pringill the trumpeter, twa fithelaris that sang Grey Steill to the king, the broken-bakkit fiddler of St. Andrew's, Quhissilgyllourie a female dancer, Willie Mercer who lap in the stank by the king's command."

Oh, a royal and democratic and merry time. It was Flodden that made men old, that tragic climax to this splendour.

"In the joyous moneth tyme of June," in the pleasant garden of the town-house of the great Earl of Angus, looking down on the still waters of the Nor' Loch, and across the woods and moors to the glittering blue Firth, there sat the pale stripling, Gavin Douglass, third son of Douglass, Archibald Bell-the-Cat, late in orders at Mony musk, but now come up to St. Giles as prior in spite of his youth, and more absorbed in poetry than men.

"More pleased that in a barbarous age
He gave rude Scotland Virgil's page,
Than that beneath his rule he held
The bishopric of fair Dunkeld."

Here I would dispute Scott. After all, Dark Ages are not always as dark as they look to those who come after. And if the "Dark Ages" of Europe were brilliantly luminous in Moslem capitals, Bagdad and Cordova, so "rude Scotland" was more polished under James IV than England under Henry VII, or France under Louis XII.

As Gavin has recorded in "The Palice of Honour," he had interview with Venus in her proper limbo, and she had presented him with a copy of Virgil, bidding him translate it. And so, quite boldly, before any Englishman had ventured, and all through the winter, forgetful--except when he wrote his prefaces of

scharp soppis of sleit and of the snypand snaw

he had worked over his translation, from the Latin into the Scottish, and now it was nearly ready "to go to the printer," or more like, to be shown to the king. In sixteen months he had completed thirteen books; for he had added a book of Maphæus Vegius, without discrimination.

He was certain of the passage _facilis descensus Averni_, for Gavin was Scotch, the time was Stewart. It ran in this wise--

"It is richt facill and eithgate, I tell thee
For to descend, and pass on down to hell,
The black zettis of Pluto, and that dirk way
Stand evir open and patent nicht and day.
But therefore to return again on hicht
And heire above recovir this airis licht
That is difficul werk, thair labour lyis,
Full few thair bene quhom hiech above the skyis,
Thare ardent vertue has raisit and upheit
Or zit quhame equale Jupiter deifyit,
Thay quhilkie bene gendrit of goddes may thy oder attane
All the mydway is wilderness unplane
Or wilsum forest; and the laithlie flude
Cocytus, with his drery bosom unrude
Flows environ round about that place."

But he was not quite certain that he had been splendid enough, and daring enough, in his application of the royal lines--

"Hic Cæsar et omnis Iuli
Progenies, magnum caeli ventura sub axem."

So he had sent for his friend, William Dunbar, Kynges Makar, laureate to the sovereign. And Dunbar was never loath for a "Flyting," a scolding. He had them on every hand, with every one, and not only those he held with "gude maister Walter Kennedy," and published for the amusement of the King and his Court. It was a more solemn event when the future Bishop of Dunkeld summoned him. Though Gavin was fifteen years younger than William, he was more serious with much study, and under the shadow of future honours, and then, too, he was a Douglass.

So Dunbar came, striding up the Canongate between the tall inquisitive houses--even he found them "hampered in a honeycaim of their own making"--a very handsome figure, this Dunbar, in his red velvet robe richly fringed with fur, which he had yearly as his reward from the King, and which I doubt not he preferred to the solemn Franciscan robe he had renounced when he entered the King's service.

James was away at Stirling. James was a poet also. Surely, on internal evidence, it is the Fourth James and not the Fifth, who wrote those charming, and improper poems, "The Gaberlunzieman" and "The Jolly Beggar."

"He took a horn frae his side, and blew baith loud and shrill,
And four and twenty belted knights came skipping o'er the hill.

"And he took out his little knife, loot a' his duddies fa';
And he was the brawest gentleman that was amang them a'."

"And we'll gang nae mair a roving,
So late into the night;
And we'll gang nae mair a roving, boys,
Let the moon shine ne'er so bright."

Dunbar, official Makar, would fain secure the criticism of young Gavin on this joyous lament he had writ to the King in absence--

"We that here in Hevenis glory ...
I mean we folk in Paradyis
In Edinburgh with all merriness."

And perhaps the young Gavin and the old Dunbar in their common fellowship of poetry, would drink a glass of red wine in memory of friends passed into death's dateless night--_Timor Mortis conturbat me_.

"He has Blind Harry and Sandy Traill
Slaine with his schour of mortall haill....
In Dunfermelyne he had done rovne
With Maister Robert Henrisoun."

And Dunbar, who was so much more human than Gavin, if older, would quote those immortal new lines of Henryson--

"Robene sat on gude grene hill
Kepand a flok of fe,
Mirry Makyne said him till,
Robene, thow pity on me."

While Gavin, so much elder than his looks, and mindful of Scottish as well as of Trojan history, would quote from Blind Harry in the name of Wallace--

"I grant, he said, part Inglismen I slew
In my quarrel, me thocht nocht halff enew.
I mowyt na war but for to win our awin (own).
To God and man the rycht full weill is knawin (known)."

Then Dunbar would wrap his rich red robe about him--I hope he wore it on ordinary days, or were there any when James the Fourth was king?--and stride back, through the Canongate to Holyrood, back to the court, where he would meet with young David Lindsay, of a different sort from young Gavin Douglass. And they would chuckle over "Kitteis Confessioun," a dialogue between Kitty and the curate, which Lindsay had just written--and would not Dunbar be gracious and show it to the King?

Quod he, "Have ye na wrangous geir?"
Quod scho, "I staw ane pek o' beir."
Quod he, "That suld restorit be,
Tharefore delyver it to me."
Quod he, "Leve ye in lecherie?"
Quod scho, "Will Leno mowit me."
Quod he, "His wyfe that sall I tell,
To mak hir acquentance with my-sell."
Quod he, "Ken ye na heresie?"
"I wait nocht quhat that is," quod scho.
Quod he, "Hard he na Inglis bukis?"
Quod scho, "My maister on thame lukis."
Quod he, "The bischop that sall knaw,
For I am sworne that for to schaw."
Quod he, "What said he of the King?"
Quod scho, "Of gude he spak naething."
Quod he; "His Grace of that sall wit,
And he sall lose his lyfe for it."

Perhaps Warbeck was listening, Perkin Warbeck who pretended to be Duke of York, pretended to the English crown. So Scotland harboured him, and Holyrood was hospitable to him. James married him to Lady Jane Gordon, and for years, until he wearied of it, maintained a protectorate over this pinchbeck Pretender.

I am certain that Dom Pedro de Ayala did not linger in the court to gossip with Dunbar, or with the hangers-on. Dom Pedro had come up from Spain on a strange ambassadorial errand, to offer to James in marriage a Spanish princess, knowing well that there might be no Spanish princess (Maria was betrothed to Portugal); but no doubt believing that there ought to be, since James was slow in marrying, and surely a Spanish princess would best mate this royalest of the Stewarts. Dom Pedro better liked the extravagant kingly court at Holyrood than the niggardly court at Windsor. He wrote home to Ferdinand and Isabella, "The kingdom is very old, and very noble, and the king possessed of great virtues, and no defects worth mentioning." No defects! Certainly not. James had the qualities of his defects, and these were royal. James could speak--not keep still--in eight languages, and could and did say "all his prayers." So Dom Pedro reports to his Most Catholic Majesty.

When he was thirty years old, this King Errant married, not the hypothetical daughter of Spain, but the substantial youthful Margaret Tudor, aged fourteen. The Scottish king would none of the alliance for years; James preferred hypothetical brides and errant affairs. But the English king saw the advantage and pressed it. He had united the roses, red and white, of England; he would fain join the thistle to the rose.