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Under the great eastern
oriel at Melrose, where the high altar of the abbey once stood, lies
buried the heart of King Robert the Bruce. Elsewhere, far off at
Dunfermline, in Fife, the body of the Scots’ King was entombed. Some
seventy years ago, when workmen in that ancient Scottish capital were
repairing the ruined church, they came upon a marble monument, broken and
defaced. Digging below amid the mould of the sepulchre they found the
skeleton of a tall man. Fragments of cloth of gold lay about it, and the
breast bone had been sawn through; and by these signs the workmen knew
that they had found the resting-place of the King. There, as one who was
present has said, after the silence and darkness of five centuries, was
seen the head that had planned and changed the destinies of Scotland;
there lay the dry bone of the arm that on the eve of Bannockburn had at
one blow slain the fierce De Bohun. But the Bruce’s heart, embalmed and
cased in silver, bearing its own strange romantic story, lies apart in the
Border Abbey. Around the place of its rest, in that fallen and mouldering
fane, lie the race that took from the heart their armorial cognisance—the
lords of the great house of Douglas.
Hot and stirring was the
Douglas blood, and hardly a battlefield of the Middle Ages in Scotland but
was stained with some of its best. Derived far back amid the mists of
antiquity, none could tell how the race arose, and it was wont to be a
boast with the house that none could point to its "first mean man." There
is a tower in Yarrow by the Douglas (dhu glas, black water) Burn
which is said to have been the stronghold of "the Good Lord James"; and
amid the fastnesses of Cairntable in Lanark there is another Douglas Water
and Douglas Castle. From one of these, no doubt, in ancient Scots fashion
the family took its name; but when that happened, and what the story was
of its early days, must remain a tale untold. The house’s medieval
greatness began, however, with the rise of Robert the Bruce, and from that
time onwards its deeds mark with stain or blazon every page of Scottish
history. Lords of the broad Scottish Border, east and west, their hands
were sometimes stronger than the king’s. At one time a Douglas could ride
to the field with twenty thousand spears at his back, and the gallop of
the Douglas steeds sometimes was terrible alike on the causeway of
Edinburgh and on the moorland marches of Northumberland. Douglas Earls and
Knights fought as leaders through all the wars of David Bruce. A dead
Douglas in 1388 won the famous fight with Hotspur on the moonlit field of
Otterbourne. At Shrewsbury, in the days of Robert III., Henry IV. of
England himself ran close to being hewn in pieces by the Earl of Douglas;
and for gallantry on the battlefields of France this same great Earl was
invested by the French King with the Dukedom of Touraine. The fame of
Scottish chivalry for three hundred years was blown abroad under the
Douglas name; for courtesies and blows alike were exchanged by the race on
many battle-fields besides those of the northern Borderland. Not that dark
deeds are lacking in their history. Dark deeds belonged to their times.
But in the tilting-yard or on the tented field were to be met no fairer
foes. Nor was their heroism all of the sword-and-buckler order, or
confined to one sex. The finest thing recorded of the race, after all, was
done by a woman. On that dark February night in 1437 when James I. was
murdered in the Blackfriars Abbey at Perth, when the noise and clashing
was heard as of men in armour, and the torches of the coming assassins in
the garden below cast up great flashes of light against the windows of the
King’s chamber, was it not a Catherine Douglas who, for lack of a bolt,
thrust her own fair arm into the staples of the door?
The fortunes of the family
culminated in the reign of James II. Whatever its origin had been, in that
reign the race had attained an eminence more dazzling, perhaps, than that
of any subject before or since. Earls of Douglas and Wigton, Lords of
Bothwell, Galloway, and Annandale, Dukes of Touraine, Lords of Longueville,
and Marshals of France, they had intermarried more than once with the
Scottish Royal House itself. Members of the family also held the Earldoms
of Angus, Ormond, and Moray. What wonder that they lifted haughty heads,
and began to look askance at the Royal power? Then it was that the Stuart
King stooped to treachery, and then was done the darkest deed that ever
sullied the Stuart name.
Already, in the boyhood of
James, a youthful Earl of Douglas and his brother had been betrayed and
slain by the King’s Ministers. For this transaction, however, the King was
in no way to blame. The young Earl was his guest in the Castle of
Edinburgh, and when at the treacherous feast the black bull’s head, the
sign of death, was placed upon their table, James had wept piteously and
begged hard for the lives of his friends. It was later, when another Earl
was lord upon the Border, that the King made murder his resource. For this
act, it must be said, James had strong provocation. Douglas had been
honoured by him, had been made Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom, and had
abused that honour. He had flouted the King’s authority, and slain the
King’s friends, and, having been commanded by letter to deliver up to
James’s representative the person of a subject unjustly imprisoned by him,
he delivered him up "wanting the head." Finally, with two great Earls of
the North, he had entered into an open league against the King. All this,
however, cannot palliate the King’s resource, cannot absolve the tragic
scene in that little supper-chamber in the Castle of Stirling. There the
great Earl was under the protection of the King’s hospitality, when James,
bursting into rage at his taunts and at his refusal to abandon the
treasonous compact, suddenly cried, "By Heaven, my Lord, if you will not
break the league, this shall!" and, drawing his dagger, stabbed Douglas to
the heart.
This deed brought the
family fortunes to a climax, and for three years Scotland was blackened by
the raging of the Douglas Wars. From Berwick to Inverness the country was
wasted by the struggles of the partisans. Stirling and Elgin were burned,
and, amid famine and pestilence, the troubles of the wars of Edward seemed
come again on Scotland: so great had grown the power of these Border
lords. At last, however, the King and the Earl came face to face. Each led
an army of forty thousand men, and only the small river Carron ran between
them. By the combat of the morrow, it seemed, would be seen whether James
Stuart or James Douglas should wear the Scottish crown. But the Earl’s
heart was seen to fail, and on the morrow, when he awoke, he found his
camp deserted. Of all his host of the previous day not a hundred followers
remained. Nothing was left him but flight; and, turning his back, as a
Douglas had never done before, he made his way to England. Twenty years
later, having been captured by one of his own vassals in a petty skirmish
on the Border, he was sent to end his days as a monk in the Fifeshire
Abbey of Lindores.
Thus ended the great line
of the Earls of Douglas, a race whose history for three hundred years had
been the history of Scotland, and whose foot had twice, at least, been set
upon the step even of the throne. From the house’s latter days of
turbulence and ambition there is pleasure in turning back to those earlier
years when the good Lord James rode at the Bruce’s saddle-bow, and the
patriotism of groaning Scotland rallied round the coupled names of Douglas
and the King. No later deed can dim the lustre of those years, and nothing
in history can outshine the last scene in the life of the Knight who
strove to carry the Bruce’s heart to the Holy Land. Himself hemmed round
by the Moors on that Spanish plain, in his effort, it is said, to succour
a friend, the Earl took from his neck the casket containing the King’s
heart. "Pass first in fight," he cried, "as thou wert wont to do! Douglas
will follow thee, or die!" Then, throwing the casket far among the enemy,
he rushed forward to the place where it fell, and was there slain. Well
would it have been for the race of Douglas had they ever remained true as
their ancestor to the service of their King! |
