Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets

These peculiarities, however, it need not be said do not belong entirely to the sixteenth century. The reader will find a great deal of beautiful poetry among the works of Dunbar. These lighter verses serve our purpose in showing once more how perennial has been this vein of humorous criticism, and frank fun and satire, in Scotland, in all ages, and in throwing also a broad and amusing gleam of light upon Edinburgh in the early fifteen hundreds, the gayest and most splendid moment perhaps of her long history.

All these splendours, however, were hard to keep up, and though Edinburgh and Scotland throve, the King's finances after a while seem to have begun to fail, and there was great talk of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land—it is supposed by the historians as a measure of securing that the King might not have the uncomfortable alternative of cutting short his splendours at home. This purpose, if it was gravely entertained at all, and not one of the proposals of change with which, when need comes, the impecunious of all classes and ages amuse themselves to put off actual retrenchment, never came to anything. And very soon there arose complications of various natures which threw all Christendom into an uproar. Henry VIII, young, arrogant, and hot-headed, succeeded his prudent father in England, and the treaty with the Scots which made, or seemed to make, England safe on the Borders, gave the English greater freedom in dealing with the other hereditary foe on the opposite side of the Channel; while France on her side began to use all possible efforts to draw from the English alliance the faithful Scots, who had always been the means of a possible diversion, always ready to carry fire and flame across the Border, and call back the warring English to look after their own affairs. James, with perhaps his head slightly turned by his own magnificence and the prosperity that had attended him since the beginning of his career, seemed to have imagined that he was important enough to play the part of peacemaker among the nations of Europe. And there are many embassies recorded of a bustling bishop, Andrew Forman, who seems for some time to have pervaded Christendom, now at Rome, now at Paris, now in London, with various confused negotiations. It was a learned age, and the King himself, as has been seen, had very respectable pretensions in this way; but that there was another side to the picture, and that notwithstanding the translator of Virgil, the three Universities now established in Scotland, and many men of science and knowledge both in the priesthood and out of it, there remained a strong body of ignorance and rudeness, even among the dignified clergy of the time, the following story, which Pitscottie tells with much humour of Bishop Forman, James's chosen diplomatist, will show.

"This bishop made ane banquet to the Pope and all his cardinals in one of the Pope's own palaces, and when they were all set according to their custom, that he who ought (owned) the house for the time should say the grace, and he was not ane good scholar, nor had not good Latin, but begane ruchlie in the Scottise fashione, saying Benedicite, believing that they should have said Dominus, but they answered Deus in the Italian fashioun, which put the bishop by his intendment (beyond his understanding), that he wist not well how to proceed fordward but happened in good Scottis in this manner, saying, what they understood not, 'The devil I give you all false cardinals to, in nomine Patris, Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, Amen.' Then all the bishop's men leuch, and all the cardinals themselves; and the Pope inquired whereat they leuch, and the bishop showed that he was not ane good clerk, and that the cardinals had put him by his text and intendment, therefore he gave them all to the devil in good Scottis, whereat the Pope himself leuch verrie earnestlie."

This did not prevent his Holiness, probably delighted with such a racy visitor, from making Forman Legate of Scotland; and it is to be feared that the meddling diplomatist with his want of education, was perhaps a better example of the clergy of Scotland, who about this time began to be the mark of all assailants as illiterate, greedy, vicious, and rapacious, than such a gentle soul as the other poet of the age, afterwards bishop of Dunkeld, the one mild and tranquil possessor of the great Douglas name.

WHITE HORSE CLOSE

The imbroglio of events into which it is unnecessary for us to enter grew more and more complicated year by year, until at length it came to be a struggle between France and England for the ally who could be of most assistance to the one in the special way of injuring the other, and whom it was of the first advantage to both to secure. James was bound by the treaty of permanent peace which he had made at his marriage, and by that marriage itself, and no doubt the strong inclination of his wife, to England; but he was bound to France by a traditionary bond of a much stronger kind, by the memory of long friendship and alliance, and the persistent policy of his kingdom and race. The question was modified besides by other circumstances. England was, as she had but too often been, but never before in James's experience—harsh, overbearing, and unresponsive: while France, as was also her wont, was tender, flattering, and pertinacious. Henry refused or delayed to pay Queen Margaret a legacy of jewels and plate left to her by her father, and at the same time protected certain Borderers who had murdered a Scottish knight, and defended them against justice and James, while still summoning him to keep his word and treaty in respect to England; while on the other hand not only the King but the Queen of France appealed to James, he as to an ancient ally, she as to her sworn knight, to break that artificial alliance with his haughty brother-in-law. It may well have been that James in his own private soul had no more desire for such a tremendous step than the nobles who struggled to the last against it. But he had les défauts de ses qualités in a high degree. He was nothing if not a knight of romance. And though, as the poet has said—

"His own Queen Margaret, who in Lithgow's bower
All silent sat, and wept the weary hour,"

might be more to him than the politic Anne of France, or any fair lady in his route, it was not in him, a paladin of chivalry, the finest of fine gentlemen, the knight-errant of Christendom, to withstand a lady's appeal. Perhaps, besides, he was weary of his inaction, the only prince in Europe who was not inevitably involved in the fray; weary of holding tourneys and building ships (some of which had been lately taken by the English, turning the tables upon him) and keeping quiet, indulging in the inglorious arts of peace, while everybody else was taking the field. And Henry was arrogant and exasperating, so that even his own sister was at the end of her brief Tudor patience; and Louis was flattering, caressing, eloquent. When that last embassage of chivalry came with the ring from Anne's own finger, and the charge to ride three miles on English ground for her honour, it was the climax of many arguments. "He loves war," the Spaniard had said. "War is profitable to him and to the country"—a curious and pregnant saying. James would seem to have struggled at least a little against all the impulses which were pushing him forward to his doom. He promised a fleet to his lady in France for her aid—a fleet foolishly if not treacherously handled by Arran, and altogether diverted from its intended end; finally, that having failed, James flung away all precaution and yielded to the tide of many influences which was carrying him away.

It is needless to tell over again the tale that everybody knows: how both heaven and hell were stirred by this ill-omened undertaking; how an aged saint, venerable and stately, suddenly appeared out of the crowd when the King was at his prayers in the Cathedral of Linlithgow, with a message from on high; and how when James had gone back to Holyrood, the High Street of Edinburgh resounded in the dead of night with trumpet note and herald's call from the grim Hades of mediæval imagination, summoning by name a long list of the Scottish nobility, of whom one man defied the portent and refused the call and was saved. James paid no heed to these warnings, whether supernatural or otherwise, or perhaps was too far committed to give any heed to them, carried away by the wild and fatal stream which had caught his feet, with something of that extraordinary impetus of natural tendency long restrained which acts with tenfold force when at last yielded to. It is unnecessary either to tell the story of all the foolish fatal lingerings upon the ill-omened way: trifling with treacherous ladies for whom he cared nothing, cartels from Surrey; the abandonment of a strong position, lest it should give him an advantage, in ever greater and greater folly of chivalry: the refusal to attack, or let his artillery attack, till his foes were all safely over the bridge: all exhibitions of high honour gone mad with the intoxication of fate. The Spaniard's letter comes back in full significance as we watch with aching hearts the fatal fray. "He said to me that his subjects serve him with their persons and goods, in just or unjust quarrels, exactly as he wishes, and that therefore he does not think it right to begin any warlike undertaking without being himself the first in danger." The knight-errant kept his consigne of honour to the last. He betrayed his people to the most utter defeat they had ever encountered, but he was himself the first victim.

Thus died the only Stewart king who ever seemed to have a fair prospect of escaping the fate of his unfortunate race. The worm in his conscience, the iron belt round his body, were perhaps only symptoms of a susceptible nature, of remorse which was excessive for the bewildered acquiescence in rebellion of an unawakened mind and an irresponsible age. And his life, if soiled by errors which were then and are now but lightly thought of in a prince, was in all public matters noble, honourable, and enlightened, with always the advantage of his country for its aim, even in the midst of the natural gaieties and extravagances of a happy temper and exuberant energy. He was extravagant, light-hearted, a lover of magnificence and display, all of which things, in the face of the political economist, sometimes prove themselves excellent for a country when the moment comes to press it forward into the ranks of high civilisation out of a ruder and more primitive development. The nobility with which his father struggled to the death he held in a leash of silk or of gold, often making them the instruments of the justice which they had so long resisted. There was peace in his time such as had never before been in Scotland, and redress of grievances, and extinction or suppression of mortal feuds and intestine struggles. It is sometimes given to a man in all light-heartedness, in what seems the spontaneous way of his own impulses and pleasures, to do what is best for his surroundings and his time, without any apparent strain of self sacrifice or gravity of duty. James Stewart, the fourth of his name, was one of these happy and beautiful natures: and though his life was one of almost unbroken prosperity and brightness, yet no man can say that his stewardry was not nobly held, and to the benefit of his kingdom and people. But not for this was the doom to pass by. The brightness and the prosperity came to an end in a sudden folly, infatuation, and madness, which belonged to him as his sunny nature did and his generosity of heart. And it was no evil chance, but the principle of his life, as we have seen, that in the calamity into which he drew his people he himself should be the first to fall.

CHAPTER V

JAMES V: THE LAST OF THE HEROIC AGE

The course of Scottish history during the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century is like that of a ship on a long voyage, full of vicissitudes and adventures. The little barque amid all the wild commotions of the sea, sometimes driven before the wind, sometimes stripped of every rag of canvas, sometimes beating helpless in the trough of the waves, rights herself when the storm is over, repairs her masts, re-strings her cordage, puts forth again sail after sail; and with a sure hand at the helm and a moderate breeze in her canvas, rises white and strong against the blueness of sea and sky, triumphant over all the assaults of external nature, animated by human will and courage, the most indomitable of all created things, and affording perhaps the best example of the survival and unconquerable power of these masters of the world: till again there arises in the heavens another hurricane, furious, ungovernable, rousing the sea to madness, striking once more the canvas from the yards, the masts from the deck, and leaving a mere hulk at the mercy of the waves which rush on her and over her with the wild rage of beasts of prey. Again and again these storms overtook the vessel of the State in Scotland, returning after every period of calm, after every recovery of authority, as wild, as tumultuous, as destructive as ever. Again and again they were overcome, the power of resistance restored, the equilibrium regained, only to fall once more into the raging of the elements. Each successive king, with perhaps one exception, had seized the helm as soon as his hand was fit for the strain, or even before it was strong enough for that office, and had gallantly brought the ship round and re-established the reign of a rational will and a certain unity of command over all the forces of the storms; but when he fell, left the helpless vessel again to be balloted about by all the winds of Fate.

SALISBURY CRAGS

This was the case almost more wildly than ever when the fourth James Stewart died at Flodden. The heir, the helpless infant prince, was not two years old, and the flower of Scotland had been slain with their king. The mature warriors and statesmen, the wise counsellors, the men to whom the country might have looked in such an interregnum, were all gone. There remained only Churchmen and boys in the devastated country, a passionate English queen of Tudor blood, and no settled centre of government or reorganised power. Such lords as were left assembled hastily for that pathetic oft-repeated ceremony, the crowning of the child, taken out of his cradle to have the fatal circlet put upon his head—and committed some sort of regency, such as it was, to the Queen. And after a moment in which the country was paralysed with woe and every house full of mourning, Scotland plunged once more into the angry waves, among the lions of ever-recurring anarchy and strife.

Nothing in all this turbulent and terrible history has ever been so tragic as Flodden. The nation which had lost the very flower and strength of its fighting men, its defenders and champions, the families which had lost their chiefs, their breadwinners—often father and son together, the master and his heir—were struck dumb with dismay and anguish. It was only a long time after, when despair had sunk into a softened recollection, that it was possible even to breathe forth that wail over the Flowers of the Forest which all Scotland knows. In the first shock of such an appalling event there is no place for elegy. There was a broken cry of anguish throughout the country, echoed from castle and cottage, where the poor women clung together, mistress and maid equal in the flood of common loss: and there was at the same time a strained and terrible rallying of all the poor defenders left, the old men and rusty arms, those of every house upon the Border and every town upon the road who had been left behind, to meet as well as they could the no doubt inevitable march of the conquering English army, which everybody felt sure must follow. When the news reached Edinburgh the magistrates of the town put forth a proclamation calling upon the inhabitants to prepare for the defence of the capital, and forbidding the women—a most significant and heartrending order, perhaps unique in public documents—to spread dismay through the streets by their crying and lamentations. The condition into which the community must have fallen when this became a public danger it is unnecessary to remark upon. The wail that sounded through all the country must have risen to a passionate pitch in those crowded streets, where the gates were closed and all the defences set, and nothing looked for but the approach of the victorious English with swords still dripping with Scottish blood. While Edinburgh waited breathless for this possible attack an extension of the existing wall was begun to defend the southern suburb, then semi-rural, containing the country-houses of the wealthy burghers and lawyers, the great convent of the Greyfriars, that of St. Mary in the Field, and many other monastic houses. This additional wall greatly increased the breadth of the enceinte, which now included a considerable space of embowered and luxuriant fields on the south side. It was called the Flodden Wall, and kept the memory of that great catastrophe and disaster before the minds of the citizens for many a day.

But for some reason or other the English army which had cut Scotland to pieces at Flodden went no farther. The victory was no doubt a very costly one, and perhaps Henry VIII did not wish to drive the kingdom of which his sister would now be Regent to extremity, or do anything more to increase the desperate hostility of a country which was capable of giving him so much trouble. At all events Surrey's army was disbanded, and Scotland was left to resume her struggle within herself: which proved the wildest and most miserable turmoil and anarchy which her troubled records had yet known.

It would be at once hopeless and unnecessary to enter into any sketch of the endless tumults of this time of distress. There was a momentary lull in which, though all the old personal feuds arose again, the poor little King and his mother were left undisturbed—she in possession of a regency more or less nominal, and in a state of health which must have subdued her activities, for her second son was not born till several months after her husband's death. But this child was only a few months old when Margaret, young, beautiful, impassioned, and impetuous, compromised her position by a sudden marriage with the young Earl of Angus—still almost a boy, and with nothing but his good looks to recommend him—an event which at once aroused all sleeping enmities and precipitated the usual struggle for the possession of the infant king. I will attempt nothing but an indication of one or two scenes in Edinburgh which took place during this struggle. Undeterred by the evil associations which surrounded that name, the Scottish lords bethought themselves of the French Duke of Albany, the nearest member of the royal family, the son of that duke who had been the terror of James III, who had conspired with England, and who finally had established himself in France and died there. His son was a French subject, the son of a French mother, inheriting through her great estates in France and a position which was little inferior in dignity, and much superior in comfort, to that of the harassed monarch of a most turbulent kingdom. But he was James Stewart, the nearest in blood to the crown, and his name seems, temporarily at least, to have united all parties, even the Queen, though his presence was fatal to her claims of regency, receiving him with courtesy and an apparent welcome. He had not been many months, however, in Scotland before, with the sanction of his council, he claimed from Margaret the possession of the King and his brother—sending four peers, appointed guardians, to the castle, to receive the children. It was in July 1515, two years after Flodden, when no doubt Edinburgh had regained that common cheerfulness and bustle of a great town which is so little interrupted even by the gravest public events. The deputation with their attendants proceeded from the Canongate, where they had been sitting in assembly, through the Netherbow Port and the bustling crowded High Street, to the castle, no doubt gathering with them on their way all the eager crowd which could free itself from shop or booth, all the passers-by in the streets, a continually-increasing throng. Who the four lords were we are not told. The whole incident is recorded in a letter of Lord Dacre to the English Council. No doubt he had his information either from the Queen herself or from members of her household. Of the four men chosen by Albany the Queen was at liberty to reject one, and no doubt they were men of weight and gravity, probably not unworthy of the trust.

It is not difficult to realise the flying rumour which would go like the wind before them announcing their errand, and how windows and doorways and stairheads would fill with eager spectators, and all the moving population would press up the hill after them to see what was to be seen. The high houses full on every story of eager heads thrust forth, relieving with unintentional yet lively decoration the many-windowed fronts, the shopkeepers crowding at their doors or seizing cap and halberd to follow, the hum and excitement of the roused town, surround the envoys like the background of a picture. Most probably they went on foot, the distance being so short, preceded by a glittering herald and pursuivant—perhaps David Lindsay, who can tell? still too young to wear the Lion of Scotland on his tabard, but keen and curious to see this scene—he who had seen the envoy of heaven in Linlithgow Church and so many other wonderful things. The crowd surged upwards, keeping a respectful space in the midst for the lords with their train, and filled with colour and movement and the murmuring of numbers that great square before the castle gates which had held the same excited throng so often. And before the heralds could summon the wardens or demand entrance in the name of the Regent, the great gates rolled back, and all who were near enough to see gazed in amazement at such a group in the gateway as must have filled many eyes with tears, and which gave at once the most astonishing climax to that wonderful picture. There Margaret stood, a young woman of twenty-five, not a noble type of beauty, perhaps, but with the fresh and florid Tudor good looks, and no doubt the imperious Tudor port imposing to the crowd, with her child in his little cloak and plumed bonnet, four years old, holding her hand. Among her little troop of attendants, the ladies of her subdued Court, and the cluster of cavaliers who surrounded her young husband, there might well be another name of gentler fame—the then Provost of St. Giles, Gawin Douglas, poet and statesman, who was her counsellor and the negotiator of her many troubled affairs. But in this emergency it was the Queen herself who bade the startled lords stand and deliver their message. They stepped forward in some confusion, one would guess, not having calculated upon this sudden encounter with such an unexpected champion, difficult to silence—not only a queen with all the prestige both real and sentimental which surrounds such a position, but also a mother whose children were threatened. When they had finished their explanation, the crowd looking on, no doubt impatient of the pause and of the voices that could not reach their ears, Margaret stepped back and bade her attendants quickly to let down the portcullis. They must have been stationed ready with the intention, and no doubt the lords had no attendants with them who could have hindered any such step or forced an entrance. While the people looked on wondering, the iron bars came crashing down, and in a moment the Queen and her child were safe though visible within. Then Margaret addressed through that iron trellis the astonished deputation. She told them that she was the guardian of the castle, enfeoffed in it by her royal husband, and not minded to yield it to any man, but that she respected the Parliament and country, and would take six days to consider the demand made to her. The lords left outside had no alternative but to turn and go back, not we may be sure without a chorus of commentaries from the lively crowd, ever quick to note the discomfiture of its masters, and delighted with such a novel sensation: though the grave burghers would shake their heads at the boldness of the Englishwoman who had so confronted the Scots lords in their own city.

The Queen transferred herself and her children to Stirling before the six days had expired, but, as might be supposed, her little triumph was short-lived. Her boyish husband had already shown signs of deserting her, and probably enough her fancy for him was as short-lived as those other ephemeral and still more tragical passions which her brother had scarcely yet begun to indulge. The excuse which the Regent and his council put forth for taking the infant King from his mother was partly her second marriage, and partly a supposed plan for carrying off the two children to England, which did actually exist, King Henry being, as a matter of fact, their nearest of kin and most powerful possible guardian, though one who would have been vehemently rejected by all Scotland: while on the other hand the little James was as yet the most likely heir to the English crown. But this scheme had been opposed both by the Queen herself—whose statement that had she been a woman of humble condition she might have taken her children in her arms and gone unknown to her brother, but that, being a queen, she could not move anywhere without observation, is full of homely and natural dignity—and by Gawin Douglas, who repeats the same objection. Margaret, however, did not long continue to identify herself with the Douglases. The conduct of Angus gave her full reason for offence, if, perhaps, she was not altogether guiltless on her side; and they were in a state of absolute estrangement when the calling of a Parliament early in the year 1520 brought Angus to Edinburgh, where with his party he had been sometimes master and sometimes proscribed man in the innumerable variations of politics or rather of personal quarrels and intrigues. Albany had by this time returned to France without however resigning his regency, and authority was more or less represented by the Earl of Arran, who was at the head of the opposite faction. The party of Arran were in possession of Edinburgh and of the little King, now eight years old, who was in the castle under charge of the peers who had been appointed his guardians, when Angus reappeared. Queen Margaret amid all these tumults, finding little encouragement from her brother, who was much more intent on securing a party in Scotland than on consulting her wishes, had also chosen to reside near her boy in the comparative safety of that stronghold. Accordingly when Earl Angus came to attend the Parliament he was confronted by his adversaries in possession of the town and of the castle, with his wife, the most violent adversary of all, in the fortress shut up from his access or approach. He was accompanied, Pitscottie tells us, "with all his kin and friends to the number of five hundred spears, weill accompanied and arrayed." But the city was hostile, and perhaps something in the sombre air of all about awakened the suspicions of the Douglases, especially as the gates were hastily shut behind them and more than usual precautions taken. Awakened thus to a sense of alarm, the threatened party sent scouts out into the streets during the night, to find out what mischief was brewing. While the humbler spies pursued their inquiries by wynd and changehouse, Maister Gawin Douglas, the bishop, went out to see what he could discover of the real state of affairs—if it was true that the westland lords had held a secret meeting and resolved that Angus should not leave Edinburgh now that he had put himself in their power—and "if he could find any gude way betwixt the two parties." In pursuance of this anxious quest he went in search of Archbishop James Beatoun, his brother of St. Andrews, whom he found in the church of the Black Friars, assisting, it is to be presumed, at some evening service.

"The said Mr. Gawin desired him to take some pains to labour betwixt this two parties which was at ane sharp point, and meaning little less than that the bishop had most part the wyte (blame) thereof. But the bishop assured him again with ane oath, chopping on his breast, saying, 'By my conscience, my lord, I know not the matter.' But when Mr. Gawin heard the bishop's purgation, and chopping on his breast, and perceived the plates of his jack clattering, he thought the bishop deceaved him, so Mr. Gawin said to him, 'My lord, your conscience is not good, for I hear it clattering.'"

REID'S CLOSE, CANONGATE

After all these advertisements—the bishop's secret coat of mail, the angry discussion between two Hamiltons in the very presence of Arran the head of the house, when he was himself willing to grant licence to Angus "to speak with the Queen's Grace and thereafter depart out of the town"—and all the lesser evidences of danger and conspiracy, the Earl and his band prepared themselves for the worst. "This young lord haisted him to his armour, and caused his friends and servants to do the same, and went right peartlie to the gate, and stood above the Nether Bow in arrayed battle." The other party, when they were made aware that the Douglases were standing on their defence, came rushing together from kirk and market, hastily assembling without discipline or order, to find the little mail-clad line arranged in the strongest way against the background of the houses, where, no doubt, every shopkeeper had rushed to his bolts and bars, and every door clanged to in view of the sudden tumult. Sir Walter has given us in The Abbot a glimpse more picturesque and graphic than any we can attempt, of the sudden scuffle in the street between two passing groups, the armed attendants more dangerous and less prudent than their masters, whose strife as to which was to hold the centre of the street was enough to produce at once an encounter of arms ending in blood, and death for some of the band. The struggle known by the name of "Clear the Causeway" was more important, yet of a similar kind. Angus and his five hundred spears—in reality a much greater number since each spear was accompanied by certain men-at-arms—had much the advantage of the other party, hurriedly roused from their occupations, who had expected to make an easy end of the Douglases, thus betrayed into a sort of ambush in a hostile city, where no man would lift a hand to help them. But the tables were completely turned upon the Hamiltons and their supporters, when rushing "out of their lodging rudlie to the gait in ane furious rage," the peaceable driven forward by the taunts of the others, they found Angus and his spears in full array of battle. "When the Earl of Angus saw them coming, and perceaved Sir Patrick Hamilton foremost, and with him the Maister of Montgomerie, and saw them in sic ane furie, he knew well there was nothing but fighting, and cryed to his men to save Sir Patrick Hamilton if they might; but he came so far before the rest that he was slain hastilie, and with him the Maister of Montgomerie, with sundry other gentlemen, to the number of twelve score and twelve persons." The end of the fray, which was "foughten very hardilie on both sides ane long space," was that Arran's men were driven down the side of the hill through the narrow wynds that led from the High Street towards the wall, and thence made their way out through some postern, or perhaps at the gate near the Well-house Tower, where the little well of St. Margaret now bubbles up unconsidered, and so across the Nor' Loch, by boat or ford. Bishop Beatoun, he whose conscience clattered beneath his robes, fled again to the Blackfriars Church, where Mr. Gawin had found him on the previous evening prepared for mischief, and took refuge there behind the altar, where he was pursued and "his rockit rivin aff him, and had been slain," but that Gawin Douglas, following the pursuers, perhaps with a sarcastic satisfaction in setting forth the virtues of a peaceful robe over the warlike covering that invited as well as preserved from danger, interposed, saying, "It was shame to put hand on ane consecreat bishop." The encounter of these two priests by evening and morning, the supercilious refusal of the mail-clad bishop to interfere, and pretence of ignorance—and, as one may imagine, the watch over him from afar of his brother of Dunkeld with the full intention of peaceful yet effective reprisals, throw a light of grim humour upon the warlike scene. Maister Gawin had no mail-coat, and would not fight; but he must have kept an eye upon his natural foe through the fray, and it would be strange if he had not some pleasure in perceiving the rochet, which Beatoun must have donned hastily to save himself, pulled over his head by rude hands in scorn of the priestly pretence—and some satisfaction in interposing to preserve the "consecreat bishop," whose behaviour was so little saintly.

"Thereafter the Earl of Angus passed to the castle and spoke with the Queen at his pleasure," says Pitscottie. It could not be a very gracious or affectionate interview. For Margaret and her husband had long before come to a complete breach, and the greatest desire in her mind was to divorce the young man whom she had married so hastily, who had treated her, indeed, with little consideration, and whom she had come to hate with a bitterness only possible to husbands and wives ill paired.

After this the young King passed from hand to hand, from one guardian or captor to another, according to the custom of his predecessors, with many troubled vicissitudes in his life: but it is pleasant to believe that though the story leaves a painful impression as of a distracted childhood, continually dragged about and harassed between contending forces, yet that persistent placidity of nature which plants flowers upon the very edge of the fiercest precipices interposed to secure for little James as for other children the nursery calm, the infant happiness which is the right of childhood. No more delightful picture of tender infancy, the babbling of the first baby words, the sweet exigence and endless requirements of a child, was ever made than that which Sir David Lindsay, the future Lyon King, whom Sir Walter Scott in gaieté de cœur (that he should ever be wrong!) introduces in full panoply of heraldic splendour before Flodden, but who was but a youth in the new James's baby days, gives in his "Epistle to the King's Grace," dedicatory to one of his poems. We will venture, though with compunction, once more as we have already done, to modernise the spelling as far as possible, so as to present no difficulty to the reader in the understanding of these delightful verses.

"When thou was young I bore thee in mine arme
Full tenderlie till thou began to gang,
And in thy bed oft happit thee full warme;
With lute in hand then sweetly to thee sang.
Sometime in dancing wondrously I flang,
And sometime playing farces on the floor,
And sometime on mine office taking cure.

"And sometime like a fiend transfigurate,
And sometime like the grisly ghost of Gye,
In divers forms oft times disfigurate,
And sometime dissagyist full pleasantly.
So since thy birth I have continually
Been occupied and aye to thy pleasoure,
And sometime Server, Coppon, and Carvoure."

In another poem he adds, upon the same subject, returning to the pleasant memory, the following happy description:—

"How, as a chapman bears his pack,
I bore thy Grace upon my back,
And sometime stridling on my neck,
Dancing with many a bend and beck.
The first syllables that thou didst moote
Was 'Pa, Da Lyn' upon the lute.
And aye when thou camest from the school
Then I behoved to play the fool."

"Play, Davy Lindsay:" the touch of nature brings the water to one's eyes. Davy Lindsay had yet to play many a spring before King James, and some that were not gay. But the gentle stripling with the infant on his shoulder, the pertinacity of the little babbling cry, the "homely springs" played offhand that it was pity to hear, but which the lad enjoyed almost as much in laughing at their dashing incorrectness as the baby who knew only that it was a pleasant sound—how bright and vivid is the picture! Thus while the lords and his mother stormed over him, the little King, perhaps in those small state-rooms in well-defended Edinburgh, perhaps in the sunshine at Holyrood with his poet, had pleasant days.

James was already a growing boy when the last and worst of the tyrannies which oppressed his youth began. When the disastrous episode of Albany was well over the Douglases again made one last desperate struggle for the supreme power. Angus it would seem was not discouraged by the change in the Queen from love to hate, nor even by the efforts which she had begun to make to divorce and shake him off, and it is evident that he must have secured the liking of the little King, to whom in the close intimacy of the family as his mother's husband he must have been known from earliest childhood. The Earl was handsome and young, one of the finest cavaliers of the Court, and probably was kind to the infant who could not contradict or cross him, and whose favour it was so expedient to secure. It costs a young man little to make himself adored by a boy to whom he seems the incarnation of manly strength and splendour. And there is every appearance that James accepted Angus's rule at first with pleasure, no doubt looking up to him as a guide in the manly exercises which could be pursued in his following with more spirit and zeal than in the Queen's surroundings. The great power of the Douglases, which it took so much bloodshed to break down, and which James II had spent all his life in contending with, extinguished in one branch of the family, seemed now to have developed in another with increased and extended force. Angus was as great, as potent, as universally feared as the Earls of Douglas had ever been; and almost as lawless, filling the country with his exactions and those of his dependants. He had attained this triumph after many drawbacks and downfalls and against the strongest opponents, and Scotland was overawed by the terror of that well-known name. It was scarcely to be supposed, however, that the young King, precociously aware of all the dangers of his position, could remain subject willingly as he grew up to the sway of a vassal of the Crown however great. There must have been private counsellors ever ready to whisper that Douglas was nothing save by the King's authority, and that James's favour alone could keep him in his usurped place. A few months after he had attained the age of sixteen, the boy over whom everybody had intrigued and plotted all his life long, who had been torn from one side to another since ever he could remember, and whom a Douglas had but recently threatened, at a moment of alarm, that rather than render him up they would tear him in two, took at last the matter into his own hands. Whether the suggestion was his own, or had in some way been breathed into his mind, there is no evidence; but it is clear that he had good reason to be very tired of his subjection. He had already attempted, we are told, several means of getting free of bondage, but had only succeeded in causing the destruction of various lords to whom he had appealed. All his friends had been alienated from him. His mother was powerless to help, and indeed on her own account in such evil case that she is said to have wandered over the country in disguise, friendless and out of favour with all. She had hastened into a third foolish marriage as soon as she had obtained her divorce from Angus, and thus lost all her supporters and champions. His uncle, Henry VIII, was more closely bound to Angus, who was strongly in the interest of England as against France, than to any other Scot, and the young King was thus surrounded by influences hostile to his freedom.

DOORWAY, SIR A. AITCHESON'S HOUSE

There are moments, however, when the most vigilant watch relaxes, and it so happened that Angus left his young prisoner on one occasion at the Castle of Falkland, the hunting seat of the Scots kings, to all appearance fully occupied with hunting and hawking and thinking of nothing more important, in the charge of Archibald Douglas, the Earl's uncle, George his brother, and a certain James Douglas of Parkhead, who was the captain of the guard. When Angus had been gone a day or two, the elder of these guardians asked leave of the King, according to the formula, to go to Dundee upon personal business of his own; and George Douglas rode off to St. Andrews to see the Bishop on a question of taxes, leaving only the captain and his hundred guardsmen to be accounted for. Who can doubt that young James was well used to all devices for deceiving his gaolers, he who had been held by so many? There was nothing in his present expedient which could have offended the most tender conscience. He desired that preparations might be made for a great hunting, calling upon "the laird of Ferme, forester of the park of Falkland, and chamberlain of Fife," to warn everybody about and call all the surrounding gentlemen "that had speedie dogs" to hunt with him, appointing the meeting next morning at seven o'clock, "for he was determined to slay ane deare or two for his pleasure." Pitscottie is very particular in his description, and places the economy of the little castle before us, among its woods—with its simplicity, its precautions, the homeliness of the household. The King desired to have "his disjeuner" at four in the morning, and bade James Douglas "gang the sooner to his bed that night that he might rise the sooner in the morning," and after he had supped, called for a drink and drank to Douglas, saying that they should see good hunting on the morn, and warning him not to be late; from which it may be guessed that Captain James was not fond of early hours. The captain saw as he thought the King go to bed, and having set the watch, and arranged everything for the night, went to bed himself, as the boy had laughingly bidden him to do. As soon as all was quiet, eluding the watch without apparent difficulty, the King, attended only by "Jockie Hart, a yeoman of the stable," and another "secret servant," escaped in the stillness of the night into the freedom of the sleeping country. It is said by one authority to have been in June that this evasion was made, but in June there is scarcely any night at all in Scotland, and the brief darkness could scarcely have served as a screen for the fugitives; probably it was earlier in the year, when the night was more to be calculated upon. One can imagine the breathless excitement and delight of the long ride, with the fresh breeze in his face, and one of the richest valleys in Scotland coming softly into sight in the midst of the morning, as the young King full of spirit, ambition, and all the rising impulses of manhood, left behind him the gentle shadow of the Lomond hills, and swept round the base of the Ochils towards the castle, high-standing on its rock, where freedom and his crown and all the privileges of royal life and independence were awaiting him. He reached Stirling in the breaking of the day, and galloping across the bridge, caused its gates to be closed after him, that no pursuer might cross the river; and was received with great rejoicing in the castle, where everything had been prepared for his coming, and where the captain, having let down the portcullis and made all secure, "laid the King in his bed, because he had ridden all that night." Probably there was no moment in the life of the young monarch, who had fallen upon such troubled times, more sweet than this when, after the wild excitement of the long night's riding, he closed his young eyes, at an hour so unaccustomed, in the clear radiance of the morning, feeling his life now free before him, as light and fair and unfettered as the rising day. But Pitscottie must continue the tale in his own admirable way. He says:—

"We will lat him sleep in his bed, and return to George Douglas, who came home to Falkland at eleven hours at night, and required at the porters what the King was doing, who answered that he was in his own chamber sleeping, who was to rise tymous to the hunting, and right so said the watchmen. George hearing this went to his bed, till on the morn that the sun rose. Then came Patrick Carmichael, baillie of Abernethie, and knocked at George Douglas's chamber door, and inquired of him what the King was doing. George answered that he was not waked as yet in his own chamber. The baillie answered, 'Ye are deceaved; he is along the bridge of Stirling this night.' Then George Douglas gat up hastilie and went to the porters and watchmen and inquired for the King, who still answered that he was sleeping in his own chamber. Then George Douglas came to the King's chamber door and found it locked, and dang it up, but found no man in it. Then he cryed, 'Fye, treason, the King is gone!'"

The confusion and dismay of the household were great. Some said that the King had gone to Bambriefe "to visit a gentlewoman," which explanation was received with relief, the question of morality being of small consequence in comparison. George Douglas immediately leaped on his horse to ascertain if this were true, but had not ridden more than two miles when he met the Earl of Rothes, who told him the King was not there. By this time the other Douglas who had gone to Dundee had returned also, and a hurried council was held what to do. Angus himself was immediately summoned from Tantallon by an express, "ane haistie post," and instantly answering, set out with his uncle and brother, and rode to Stirling with some forlorn hope it would appear of recovering their empire over the King. But James had already gathered counsellors round him, and was himself too strongly determined to maintain his liberty to allow any approach. The road to Stirling would no doubt be full of scouts, to give warning of what the discomfited but powerful family meant to do, and as soon as their approach was known a herald was sent to the town cross to proclaim by sound of trumpet a royal decree that neither Angus nor his companions should approach within six miles of where the King was under pain of death. It is curious to mark how in a moment the great power of the Douglases and their high courage collapsed in face of this proclamation. They paused on their hasty ride, and held another hasty council, and though some among them were for pressing forward and seizing once more the malapert boy who defied them, the Earl himself and his brother decided to obey the proclamation and withdraw. They fell back upon Linlithgow, where they paused a day or two hoping perhaps for better news. But by this time the other nobles were crowding round the King. Huntly, Argyle, Athole, Glencairn, Monteith, and Rothes, with a still larger company of barons, hastened to Stirling to protect and aid with their counsel the liberated prince. Archbishop Beatoun, the wily Churchman, who had done all he could to overthrow Angus,—who had been for a moment so worsted in the conflict that he skulked about his own Fife moors in the disguise of a shepherd, but who had lately made friends with the dominant family and entertained the King and his guardians together, calling them "to his pasche (Easter) at St. Andrews,"—and who had no doubt known of the momentous night journey, and probably detained George Douglas late that evening to make it more sure, had also joined the King.

With this powerful escort James proceeded to Edinburgh, where for some time the lords around him kept watch night and day, keeping their little army of attendants under arms in case of any attack on the part of Angus. One night, we are told, James himself in full armour took the command of the guard, more probably, however, from a boyish desire to feel himself at the head of his defenders than for any other reason; and even his bedchamber was shared, after an unpleasant fashion of the time, by the bastard of Arran, "James Hamilton, that bloody butcherer," as Pitscottie calls him, who had precipitated the fray of "Clear the Causeway" and was Angus's most inveterate enemy. These extraordinary precautions, however, seem to have been unnecessary. The Douglases would appear to have accepted their defeat as complete, and to have been entirely cowed by it. Another proclamation was put forth on the arrival of the King in Edinburgh commanding all true subjects to refrain from intercourse of any kind with Angus, his brother, and uncle, not to receive them or succour them or hold any communication with them on peril of being considered sharers in their crime—in short, a sort of interdict after the papal fashion. The impromptu council sat for two days in the upper chamber of the Tolbooth, which was the recognised Parliament House, chiefly, it would seem, to hear the King's indictment against the family of Douglas. James set forth all his grievances, his subjection to the will of Angus, his separation from his own friends, the appearance he had been made to assume of enmity to his real champions, and vowed at the end, says Pitscottie, in the fervour of his indignation and resentment, that Scotland should not hold them both. He would receive nothing but support in that assembly where all had suffered from the supremacy of Angus, and where the too powerful race had no friends. The council appointed anew all the high officers of State, whose posts had been appropriated by the Douglases, and sent an envoy to England to announce that the government of Scotland was henceforward in the King's own hands. It was also ordained that a Parliament should be called in the month of September, to confirm in a more decorous and regular way the decisions of the present hasty assembly.

When Parliament met these questions were accordingly discussed over again, with confirmation of what had been already done. It was decided that Angus should be summoned before them to answer for his misdeeds, under the penalty if he did not appear of being "put to the horn and banished during the King's will." Angus was not so rash as to trust himself within the power of his enemies, as his kinsmen of the house of Douglas had already done on two fatal occasions: and as neither he nor his retainers put in an appearance, they were accordingly attainted, their lands forfeited to the Crown, their name put under the public ban, their great castle of Tantallon seized, and themselves proclaimed through all the country as traitors whom no man should receive or succour.

The complete downfall which overtook this great house after the young King's abandonment of it is very remarkable, and shows how important was the royal position, notwithstanding the manner in which it had been exploité, and the mere nominal power of its actual possessor. The house of Angus crumbled into the dust as soon as their young prisoner escaped their hands. They took refuge in England, where they vainly attempted on various occasions to negotiate for their return, but with no success. The name continued obnoxious to James during his whole life. Sir Walter has done his best to rehabilitate that name in the noble Douglas of The Lady of the Lake, who has been identified with Archibald of Kilspindie, "the uncle of the banished Earl," the story of whose appearance at the games at Stirling is said to have some foundation of reality. But the historians of the house, who alone mention this, state the facts in a very different way.

Thus the Angus branch of the Douglas family fell, as the Earls of Douglas had fallen, and for a generation there was little heard of it save in mutterings of treason in moments of difficulty, which never came to much—until in the following reign the indomitable race rose again in another branch and under another name, and furnished in the Regent Morton one of the strongest as well as the most questionable figures of a deeply disturbed time. Never was a race more difficult to subdue.

The escape of James from Falkland took place between Easter and June in the year 1527. In 1528, the Douglases being clean swept out of the country, the young King went on a professed hunting expedition to the Borders, where, besides innumerable deer, its ostensible reason, his ride through the southern district carried punishment and death to many a Border reiver and especially to the famous John or Johnnie Armstrong, the Laird of Kilnokie, and chief or at least best-known representative of his name. Whether it was wise policy to hang the reiver who was the terror of the Borders, yet "never molested no Scottis man," it is not necessary to decide. He was a scourge to the English, of whom it was said that there was none from the Scottish Border to Newcastle who did not "pay ane tribute to be free of his cumber." Johnnie Armstrong had the folly to come into the King's presence with such a train, his men so completely armed and so many in number, as to compete with royal magnificence, not very great in Scotland in those days. "What wants yon knave that a king should have?" said the young James, who had certainly had enough of such powerful subjects: and he would not listen to either excuse or explanation from the Borderer, whose defiance as he was led to his execution, and the wail of his wild followers after him, sounds still in the stirring strains of song and ballad. No doubt it was justice that James did—but justice somewhat stern and out of time.