Chapter IV: The Empress of the North (2)

So James, in August, 1503, journeyed out to Dalkeith, whither Margaret had come. He returned to "hys bed at Edinborg varey well countent of so fayr a meetyng." A few days later, Margaret made her entry into Edinburgh, James having met her, gallantly dressed in "a jacket of crimson velvet bordered with cloth of gold." Leaving his restive charger, "mounting on the pallefroy of the Qwene, and the said Qwene behind hym, so rode throw the towne of Edinburgh." Their route lay through the Grassmarket up to the Castle Hill, and down the High Street and the Canongate, to the Abbey. Here they were received by the Archbishop of St. Andrews. Next day they were married by the Archbishop of Glasgow, the Archbishop of York joining in the solemn and magnificent celebration.

It is the most splendid moment in Edinburgh history, within the Abbey and the palace, and within the city. The Town Cross ran with wine, the high _lands_ were hung with banners and scarlet cloth, and morality plays were performed before the people. In the palace there was a royal scene. And our friend, William Dunbar, Kynges Makar, read his allegory of "The Thrissl and the Roiss," which is still worth reading, if Chaucer is worth reading.

But, at night, in the royal apartment, the night before the wedding, perhaps in the fragment of the old palace which remains, the gallant king played to the little princess upon the virginal; and then, on bended knee and with unbonneted head, he listened while she played and sang to him. Out of the dark of the time it is a shining scene; and out of the splendour of the moment it brings a note of tenderness.

Another decade, another August, and the Boroughmoor (where now run the links of Burntland) was covered with the white of a thousand tents, Scotland was gathered for war, the "ruddy lion ramped in gold" floated war-like over all, and James and all Scotland prepared to march down to Flodden, heeding not the warning which had sounded at midnight in ghostly voice at the Town Cross; a warning no doubt arranged by Margaret, never a Stewart, always a Tudor. And--all Scotland was turned into a house of mourning.

Half a century later the history of Scotland came to a climax, and Mary Stewart came to Holyrood; that queen who then and ever since held half the world in thrall, like another Iseult. The covenanted world has rejected her, as no doubt it would reject Iseult.

Shrouded in a gray "haar" from off the North Sea, rising like a Venus out of the mists of the sea, Mary Stewart, Dowager of France, Queen of Scotland, Heiress of England, came unto her own. And, her own received her, and, received her not.

The castle hanging high in air no longer hung there. The palace lying low on the plain was not there, on that August 19, 1561. There was nothing but what was near at hand; Mary could not see a hundred feet into her kingdom. In truth she arrived at port a week before the ship was expected--and Mary also flashed through her kingdom; witness the ride across the Marches to the Hermitage, and the ride through the North to punish Huntley. Hers was a restless soul, a restless body.

On her return to the kingdom she was accompanied by a great retinue, three of her French uncles of Guise and of Lorraine, her four Maries, and many ambassadors. It was a suspended moment in the world, the sixth decade of the sixteenth century. And nowhere were affairs in such delicate balance, or so like to swing out of balance as in Scotland; where religion, sovereignty, feudalism, morality, were swaying dizzily. So all the world sent their keenest ambassadors to observe, to foresee if possible, to report.

Yet Mary rode through the mists.

"Si grand brouillard," says the Sieur de Brantome, that gossipy chronicler, and Mary and her French courtiers and Scotch Maries, rode through the "haar," from Leith up whatever was the Leith Walk of that day to Holyrood.

The palace must have rung with French chatter, of these wondering and inquisitive and critical folk; for all the cultured world was French in those days, and Mary and her Maries had been only five or six when they left stormy Scotland for the pleasant smiling land of France.

Not for long was she permitted to believe she had brought France back with her and there was no reality in Scotland but as she made it. Reformation pressed in upon her, even through the windows of this turret where again she seems to listen to that prophetic and pious serenade, Scottish protestant psalms accompanied by fiddles and sung to a French Catholic queen. "Vile fiddles and rebecks," complains Brantome, hesitating to call vile the mob of five hundred gathered in the Scotch mists; but they sang "so ill and with such bad accord that there could be nothing worse. Ah, what music, and what a lullaby for the night!"

The rooms of Mary are still inclosed, the walls still stand about them, and a romantic care withholds the ravages of time from those tapestries and silken bed hangings, dark crimson damask, which Mary drew about her on that night of her return. And here hangs a picture of Queen Elizabeth, authentic, Tudoresque, which did not hang here when Mary returned; but what dark shadow of Elizabeth lurked behind these hangings! The very guard to whom you protest the picture understands--"I think it an insult to her memory."

It is here that Queen Mary still reigns. All the old palace was burned, carelessly, by Cromwell's soldiers, at what time men were caring nothing for palaces, and less for royalty. But, fate was royal, was Jacobite, and this gray turret of the northwest corner a building of James V on a foundation of James IV--perhaps where he had listened in the evening to Margaret and her virginal--was saved from the wrath of the Commonwealth. Within these very walls Mary played on the virginal, perhaps on the rebeck, and many sought to know her stops--"you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me."

Here she was loved, as she still is loved. Here she made love, the mystery!--as always. Here she flashed those bright eyes on courtiers and commoners and straightway these fell into bondage--the Stewarts never drew the line of division. Here those eyes battled with John Knox as he met her in Dialogues, as John has faithfully recorded. And here those bright eyes filled with a storm of tears at his denunciation; but Knox felt their power. Here she met Darnley, in the chapel married him, and Knox called after dinner to declare that the Reformation did not approve. Here by the very stairs of the turret Darnley led the murderers on Rizzio, from his private apartments to hers. (I find it fit that Ker of Fawdonside, one of the murderers, should have married later the widow of Knox.) Mary was held here a prisoner; they would "cut her into collops and cast her over the wall" if she summoned help. But Mary could order that the blood stains of the fifty-six wounds of Rizzio should remain "ane memoriall to quychen her revenge." They quicken our thought of Mary to-day--if we accept them. From Holyrood Mary went to Kirk o' Field on a Sunday night in February to visit Darnley who lay "full of the small pox." He had come back from Bothwell castle on Mary's urging; but he had gone to Bothwell to escape her revenge for Rizzio. She returned to Holyrood--"the Queen's grace gang and with licht torches up the Black Friar's Wynd"--where the wedding festivities of a member of her household were in progress. And, I doubt not, devoted to Mary as I am, that she was the merriest of the company.

Then the dark.

Then, at two in morning, an explosion that shook all Edinburgh, that astonished the world, that still reverberates through the world.

Then--the dark.

A marriage, at two in the morning, a flight to Borthwick, a meeting at Carberry, one more night in Edinburgh, in a house as mean as that of Kirk o' Field, a day at Holyrood, and a forced ride with ruffian nobles, Lindsay and Ruthven on each hand, to Loch Leven, thirty miles in the night of June 16, 1567--and Edinburgh and Holyrood and the Crown of Scotland know her no more.

"Helen's lips are drifting dust,
Ilion is consumed in rust."

And Mary. And Holyrood.

There is one more Holyrood scene descending from this. On a Saturday evening, March 26, 1603, the son of Mary, the King of Scotland, supped with the Queen, perhaps in that small supper room where Rizzio was supping with a queen; and they had retired. "The palace lights were going out, one by one." And Sir Robert Carey, three days out from London, clattered into the courtyard, the King was roused, Sir Robert knelt before him--

"Queen Elizabeth is dead, and Your Majesty is King of England!"

James I of England, James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, son of Darnley, son of the ninth generation from Bruce, The Bruce. The "auld enemy" is finally defeated; and to borrow again from Rosaline Masson, "the lights of Holyrood went out, one by one."

In the long picture gallery of this dull modern palace, nothing of which either Mary or James ever saw, there hangs a series of portraits, one hundred pictures of Scottish kings, painted under order of Charles II in 1680, by the Fleming, DeWitt, who agreed to furnish the pictures in two years for one hundred and twenty pounds. They begin with Fergus I, 330 B. C. They are the kings who passed before the prophetic vision of Banquo. Enough to frighten Macbeth!

One brief brilliant ghost of Stewart glory returns. In this gallery was held the ball of Prince Charles Edward, described in "Waverley."

And after this theatric moment, and after the Prince had defeated the "royalists" at Falkirk, Hardy's dragoons slashed these pictures of Scottish kings, since the Prince they could not reach.

_Princes Gardens_

There are certain public places of beauty where the beauty is so enveloping that the place seems one's very own, seems possessed. That, I take it, is the great democratic triumph, in that it has made beauty a common possession and places of beauty as free to the people as is the air.

Chief of these is Princes Street Gardens.

I could, in truth I have, spent there days and half-days, and twilights that I would willingly have lengthened to midnights, since the northern night never quite descends, but a romantic gray twilight veils everything, and evokes more than everything. For any lengthened visit in Edinburgh I dare not inhabit a hotel room on the Garden side, since all my time would be spent at the window. For a shorter visit, such a room lengthens the day, defies the closed gate of the Gardens.

It was from such a window as this, "From a Window in Princes Street" that Henley looked forth--

"Above the crags that fade and gloom
Starts the bare knee of Arthur's Seat;
Ridged high against the evening bloom
The Old Town rises, street on street;
With lamps bejeweled, straight ahead,
Like rampird walls the houses lean,
All spired and domed and turreted,
Sheer to the valley's darkling green;
Ranged in mysterious array,
The Castle menacing and austere,
Looms through the lingering last of day;
And in the silver dusk you hear,
Reverberated from crag and scar,
Bold bugles blowing points of war."

Princes Street is, I believe, not a mile long, a half-mile the part which is gardened. It is the loveliest street in the world. It seems infinite instead of half-mile.

Of course to the loyal American that praise is received half-way. For he remembers Riverside Drive with the majesty of the Hudson, North Shore Drive with the shoreless infinity of Lake Michigan, Summit Avenue with the deep gorge of the Upper Mississippi, Quebec and its Esplanade. But even these "handsome streets" cannot match Princes for history and beauty in one, for the old and the new, for the Old Town and the New Town.

Princes Street, to speak briefly of its geography, is a broad thoroughfare, with a medley of buildings on the north side, but uniform in gray stone, where hotels and shops furnish the immediate life of the city. There are electric cars running the full length of the street; and it is the only street I know which is not spoiled through the presence of these necessary carriers.

There are cabs, and there are sight-seeing cars, from which in high advantage, and in half a day, you can see everything in Edinburgh. Yes, actually. I who speak to you have done it, partly for the greed of seeing it steadily and seeing it whole, and partly for the comment of these Scotch coach drivers and guards, who are not merely Scottish but the essence of Scotland. I shall never forget how an American traveler--of course they are all Americans in these tally-hos--commenting on the driver's remark that the "Old Queen" wanted to build a palace where Donaldson's Hospital now stands and she was refused--"but she was the Queen!" Nevertheless, asserted Mr. Sandy Coachman, "She was refused." Not so in the old days of Queenship.

The entire life of Edinburgh, of Scotland, streams through this broad straight street.

On the opposite side lie the Gardens, stretching their way parallel with the street, a wide, green-lawned, tree-forested purlieu, terraced and flowered, with a "sunken garden" near the Castle-side, through which trains are conveyed. The smoke, so much lamented, does often rest with grace and gray loveliness in the hollows of the place, so that one does not miss the waters of the Nor' Loch that once flowed here as moat.

Above rises the castle in greater majesty than from any other point. Down from the castle runs the ridge of the High Street, and the high _lands_ with flags of washing hanging out the windows which answer the flags red and leoninely rampant, on the buildings of Princes Street. The crown of St. Giles and the spire of the Tronkirk hanging above all.

To the west is St. John's, where in the graveyard Raeburn is buried; and old St. Cuthbert's, where in the graveyard De Quincey is buried. There are Raeburns in the Royal gallery which stands on the island dividing the Gardens, and there are many Raeburns here and there, in private rooms of banks and other institutions, rare Raeburns with that casual, direct, human look he could give men and women. The galleries are worth a visit both for their best, and for their not-best. There are statues of famous Scotsmen on the terraces, and of course the Scott monument, beautifully Gothic, and as sacred as a shrine.

There are goods to be bought in the shops, pebbles and cairngorms in jewelry and kickshaws of that ilk; rugs and plaidies, sashes and ties, and Scott and Stevenson books bound in the Royal Stewart silk. Unhappy the traveler who has not provided himself beforehand with a tartan. Almost every one can if he will. And there is always the college of heraldry to help one out. Or the audacity of choosing the tartan you like best; an affront, I assure you, to all good Scots. For however unlovely a Scotch tartan may be in the eyes of the world--nominations are invidious--in the eyes of the clansman there is nothing so "right" as his own particular tartan. He would not exchange it for a Douglass or a Stewart.

These tartans have exerted a very marked effect on the Scottish sense of taste. On Princes Street you may not find such richly dressed women as on Regent Street, but the harmony of colouring will please you better. While no doubt this is due to the fact that for several hundred years the Scottish taste has had the benefit of intimate association with the French, it can also be traced to the longer centuries during which tartans have brought an understanding of colour harmonies. Because there has been this love of colour, there has come with it vanity. With vanity there has come that rare ability of the women of the race to maintain a unity, a harmony, a complete relationship between skirts and waists. There is no country in Europe where the "act of union" at the feminine waistline is so triumphant as in Scotland, particularly in Edinburgh. The universal American achievement has been equaled in Europe only in Scotland.

There are teashops which invite you in, when the wind sweeps too harshly, or the rain beats itself into more than a Scotch mist, or even when the sun shines too hot. There is a garden tea place on top of a high hotel which confronts the Castle. Even in this Far North there is much open air dining, and more especially open air tea-ing. I am not certain that Dr. Johnson would have much cared for this modern tea room, where he might review the world. It seems that he drank much tea when he was the guest of Boswell, especially when he was the guest of Mrs. Boswell, in James Court the other side the Gardens. "Boswell has handsome and very spacious rooms, level with the ground on one side of the house, and the other four stories high." And Boswell says of Johnson, "My wife had tea ready for him, which it is well known he delights to drink at all times, particularly when sitting up late." From this roof tea garden one can see James's Court at the top of the Mound, although the Boswell lodgings are burned down. And one can almost see Holyrood, where tea was introduced by James VII.

After you have shopped and had your tea, and the past retakes possession, you will return to the green valley of the Gardens, to forget the clang of the tram cars, to look up at the great Castle Hill, green until it meets the buff-coloured stone and the buff-coloured buildings that seem to grow out of the stone, if it is a clear day; while the ramparts seem temporarily to have blossomed with red geraniums, if red coats are leaning over the edge.

A clear day in Edinburgh is possible. I have spent a month of such days, and have longed for the mists, a touch of them, that the castle might turn to a purple wonder, and the deep blue shadows sink over it, and the gray precipice of the High Street look higher than ever. Gray is in truth the colour of Edinburgh, "the gray metropolis of the North." But it is never a dreary gray, never a heavy gray like London. There the gray is thick, charged with soot; one can rub it from his face. In Edinburgh the gray is luminous, a shifting playing colour, with deep shadows turning to deep blue, with rifts or thinnings of the cloud, through which yellow and brown glimmers make their way.

Above all, Edinburgh is never monotonous. That is perhaps its charm, a something that every feminine city knows; Edinburgh is feminine, and Paris, and Venice, and New Orleans.

And there hangs the castle, sometimes in midair--

"Hast thou seen that lordly castle, that castle by the sea?
Golden and red above it the clouds float gorgeously."

Sometimes standing stalwart and stern, a challenge to daring, a challenge to history. That farther edge of the Castle Hill as it is silhouetted against the west sky--if you walk around on Lothian Street you can see the full face of the Rock--has invited many an adventurer, both from within and without.

It was down that steep hill that the sons of Margaret carried their queen mother, when the hosts of Donalbane were besieging the place, and a Scotch "haar" rolling in from the sea and shutting off the castle enabled the little procession to pass safely with its precious burden, and swiftly down to the Queen's ferry, and across to Dunfermline.

Up the face of that Rock when The Bruce did not hold this stronghold there stole in the night of a thirteenth century winter--it must have been much colder, even in Edinburgh, in the thirteenth century--a picked band of men; picked by Randolph afterward Earl of Moray, and led by Frank, who, years before when he had been a soldier in the castle garrison and night leave was forbidden, used to make his way down this cliff to visit a bonnie lassie in the West Bow. Now, on a wind-swept night, which can be very windy around that castle profile--the wind has not abated since the thirteenth century--Frank led the remembered way. I wonder if he remembered the lassie. But his footing was sure. Once, it is true, the sentinel seemed to have discovered them. But it was only the boast the sentinel makes to the night when he makes his last round. The men huddled against the face of the Rock. Then they moved onward. The ladders were too short to reach the rampart. Two were bound together. The men over, the cry "A Moray!" rings in the castle. Scotland has won it again.

Another century, and James III is king. This least royal of the Stewarts, jealous of his more royal brother, locked the Duke of Albany in the castle, and felt secure. But the Duke had friends. A French clipper came into Leith. It brought wine to Albany, and the wine cask contained a rope. Inviting his guardians to sup with him, he plied them with heated wine, perhaps drugged wine, then, the dagger. Albany's servant insisted on going down the rope first. It was short, he fell the rest of the distance. Albany hurried back for the sheets from his bed, made his safe way down. He carried the servant man all the way to Leith--he had just "whingered" the guard--found the boat, and safety, and France.

Up the Rock, in Covenanting days, stole Claverhouse, the Bonnie Dundee, to a secret conference with the Duke of Gordon, hoping to win him away to Stewart loyalty and the North.

I cannot remember that any of Scott's characters went this way. He thought it "scant footing for a cat." But Stevenson knew the way. Perhaps not actually, but he sent more than one of his characters up or down the Rock--St. Ives with a rope that was long enough to reach.

_Calton Hill_

Perhaps the best view of Edinburgh--only perhaps, for each view differs, and you have not seen the whole city unless you have seen it from the various vantage points--is that from the Calton Hill. For a very good reason. The Hill itself is negligible enough, although it is impossible to understand Edinburgh, to understand Scotland, unless you have looked on the architectural remnants on this Hill, and considered them philosophically. But, as Stevenson said--"Of all places for a view, the Calton Hill is perhaps the best; since you can see the castle, which you lose from the castle, and Arthur's Seat, which you cannot see from Arthur's Seat." An excellent reason, which also places the castle and Arthur's Seat.

Calton Hill does not tower so high over the city as these other two points; one may still look up to Arthur's Seat, one may look across to the castle. Yet, the city lies near. Yet, the country rolls out to the Firth, and out to the Pentlands. Perhaps a gray-sea haze dulls the far edge of the far Kingdom of Fife. Perhaps a blue haze hangs over the Pentlands. Perhaps a smoke-cloud makes a nearer sky for the town itself, this Auld Reekie. Not only perhaps, but very probably. There are clear days in Edinburgh. They are to be treasured. There is no air more stimulating in all the world. October sometimes slips into the other months of the year, fills the air with wine, clears the air of filament. But, not often, not often for the tourist from beyond seas who makes Edinburgh in the summer. But still it is possible from Calton Hill to catch the farthest glory of the encircling hills, and the near glory of the ever glorious city.

The Hill itself is a place of monuments, and a very pretentious place. Also, very absurd. I suppose it is possible to be of two minds about the remnant of the Parthenon which stands so conspicuously on the highest plateau, a construction dating back to that royal time when George the Fourth came to this northern capital, and was--alas!--received as though he were Bonnie Prince Charlie himself; and was received--again alas!--by Sir Walter clad in a Campbell plaid, and as loyal to the Regent, the florid Florizel, as he had been to Prince Charles in the "Waverleys." Because of all these loyalties this never finished monument, with its twelve columns and architrave spread above, looks sufficiently pathetic, and sufficiently absurd. "A very suitable monument to certain national characteristics," said a later Scots writer, who perhaps never ceased being a Jacobite.

There are monuments; one to Dugald Stewart, and the visitor not philosophical is apt to ask, Who was Dugald Stewart? There is a memorial to Burns whose friend Willie that brewed a peck o' malt lies in the Old Calton burying ground near by. Hume lies there, too, and Dr. John Brown, and Stevenson's dead.

"There on the sunny frontage of a hill,
Hard by the House of Kings, repose the dead,
My dead, the ready and the strong of word.
Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive;
The sea bombards their founded towers; the night
Thrills pierced with their strong lamps. The artificers
One after one, here in this grated cell,
Where the rain erases and the dust consumes,
Fell upon lasting silence."

There is a monument to Lord Nelson. And looking as though he belonged there is a bronze figure of Abraham Lincoln.

All this lies about, with casual sheep cropping the grass.

But, there lies the city. And there lies the country.

To the south rises Arthur's Seat, the lion. The much castellated jail, is beneath you, another absurd elaborate building, a castle after castle-days. Farther a-city lies Holyrood, with the ruined abbey, the Queen Mary wing, and the scarlet patch of the sentinel moving to and fro and guarding all this vanished greatness. Nothing more appeals than this sentinel-watch of the ghosts of the past.

Turn but a little and the Old Town lies before you, the castle splendid, still the guardian, the long ridge of the High Street with its jagged buildings that from here rise almost to the purple edge of the hilly Pentland background, with the spire of the Tolbooth and the crown of St. Giles breaking against the sky. And down at the foot of the vantage Hill stretches Princes Street with the Scott monument rising athwart the haze of city and sky.

From the north edge of Calton there is a more empty panorama, but still significant. Now it is bound in with tenements high and thick, but in the golden days it was a steep hillside leading down to a jousting ground. Tradition has it that Bothwell launched his horse down its almost-precipice, and so entered the tilting ground, while ladies' bright eyes rained influence and gave the prize; but most glowing were the eyes of Mary.

Beyond, the suburbs fill in the two miles that stretch to Leith, and to the Firth, glittering out to the far sea.

At night, if you have no fear of hobgoblins or of hooligans, Calton Hill is an experience. It is a still place, the silence the greater because the city lies so near, and looks so busy with its twinkling lights. A gulf of gloom lies between. The night is velvet black, a drop curtain against which is thrown the star-pricked map of the city. One can well believe how the young Stevenson, in those romantic days when he carried a lantern under his jacket, used to climb this hill venturesomely, and with the dog in "Chanticler," exclaim, "I shall never forget the first night I lapped up the stars." It is something to lap stars from the black pool which is Edinburgh by night.

If you have, happily, lived in a high city, Boston, Seattle, Duluth, Denver, St. Paul, San Francisco, with water and land combined, you, too, have lingered upon a heaven-kissed hill on such a night as this, and Edinburgh seems native.

Scott, of course, must have known Calton Hill, although Salisbury Crags under Arthur's Seat, with its more feasible promenade, better appealed to him when he was writing the "Waverleys." There is an American who has written of the Hill, a young inland American whom the gods loved to an early death. I remember hearing Arthur Upson talk of days and nights on the Calton, and his sonnet catches the note--

"High and alone I stood on Calton Hill
Above the scene that was so dear to him
Whose exile dreams of it made exile dim.
October wooed the folded valleys till
In mist they blurred, even as our eye upfill
Under a too-sweet memory; spires did swim,
And gables, rust-red, on the gray sea's brim--
But on these heights the air was soft and still,
Yet, not all still; an alien breeze will turn
Here, as from bournes in aromatic seas,
As round old shrines a new-freed soul might yearn
With incense of rich earthly reveries.
Vanish the isles: Mist, exile, searching pain,
But the brave soul is freed, is home again."