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I
HAVE not strictly kept to the present in
giving a to-day’s impression of Edinburgh Castle. The ghosts are too much
for one; something of history needs must obtrude itself. And now let us
leave our own time behind or in front, and turn for a little to some of
the chief episodes in the romantic annals of the Rock. I have said
something of its mythical origin. At the dawn of authentic history is the
figure of St Margaret, the Queen of Malcolm Canmore. According to the
ideals of her own age she was well-nigh perfect, and if its ways are not
our ways, there is still enough left for genuine admiration.
In 1093 she lay dying in
the Castle, and to her in her mortal sickness Edgar brought the tale of
the death of her husband and son at Alnwick. With a few murmured words of
resignation, holding in her hand the Black Rood of Scotland, the precious
relic of the true cross that Edward I. was later to have for spoil, she
passed away. This was in mid-November. And to her children, mourning round
her bed, there came news that the Castle was besieged. There was even then
in Scotland a national party who were for the old ways, and hated and
feared English influence, and that robust pagan, Donald Bane, the brother
of Malcolm, was at their head, determined to make short work of everything
that stood between him and the throne. He was round the Castle with a huge
herd of kerns and gallowglasses. The records preserve for us a glimpse of
those savages, with their wrappings of dun deer’s hide, the jingling rings
of their armour, and their awe-inspiring yells. They were more violent
than cunning, under the pall of a miraculous mist—so it seemed to the
excited actors in the scene, though it was only that easterly haar which
Tennyson and R. L. S., the gifted stranger and the gifted citizen, have,
unlike the pious monkish chronicler, combined to curse in the choicest
verse and prose, Margaret’s body was conveyed away by that very west port
sally, long centuries afterwards the meeting-place of Gordon and Dundee,
and so down to the Forth, and across the familiar ferry for the last time.
Three of her children were afterwards Kings of Scotland, and one was Queen
of England, but their fates do not
here concern us.
We light on a trivial saying
treasured up with comic effect.
Alexander III. was married to
Margaret, daughter of Henry III. of England, at York, Christmas, 1251. The
poor child was only sixteen, and the grim and gloomy perch on the Rock not
at all to her liking. "A sad and solitary place, without verdure, and by
reason of its vicinity to the sea unwholesome," thus she murmured to her
father. She had complaints even less reasonable; she was "not permitted to
make excursions through the Kingdom "—Ah, little she knew that Kingdom!
What a prize for Border moss-trooper or Highland cateran !—"nor could she
choose her friends or attendants," and then the voice is still. We are not
told how this ancient bedchamber question was determined. Possibly she
found life in the Castle exciting enough. After Alexander the annals take
us through the inception of the fierce struggle for independence. Edward
I. got the Castle, then it was taken by Randolf in 1312, and he at once
dismantled it. However, the English had it again under Edward III., though
it fell into Scots hands almost immediately. In 1400 Henry IV. besieged
it, but he was driven off by cold, and rain, and hunger. History is
naturally enough always repeating itself. The Czar of Russia in the
Crimean War boasted he had two unsurpassable Generals who always fought
for him, Generals Janvier and Fevrier, and so famine and
cold and hunger, the very lacks of Scotland, were the best fighters these
intrepid defenders had. You turn another page.
The Duke of Albany, brother of
Robert III. (1390-1406), was at the Castle one night in the early years of
the century. He was pacing the ramparts with some companions when a meteor
of portentous size flashed its lurid light through the sky. The age
believed that the
"Heavens themselves show forth the
death of princes."
You do not wonder that Albany
foretold a tragic end to some great personage. He took the best means to
fulfil his own prediction. His nephew, the Duke of Rothesay, was in 1402
starved to death in Falkland Castle, and there is no doubt that Albany was
"art and part," as Scots lawyers phrase it, in the murder.
As relief, there is the comic escape
of the infant James II., engineered by his mother Jane, widow of James I.
He was stuffed in a box mercifully provided with a few air-holes, and so
carted away as luggage. She was off on a pilgrimage to Whitekirk in East
Lothian, so she gave out; as a matter of fact she went to Stirling, and by
way of anti-climax presently returned to Edinburgh.
Two years later occurred the
terrible Douglas tragedy of the Castle, and even the men of that iron age
shuddered at the cruel report. William, Earl of Douglas, a lad of sixteen,
was the head of that great house. His state was regal, and his ambition
threatened danger; so Crichton, the chancellor, thought. He inveigled
Douglas and his brother to the Castle, and as they sat at meat with the
King a black bull’s head was placed on the table. In such dramatic fashion
was their doom intimated to them in symbol. The child King wept and
protested in vain; the boys were dragged forth. There may have been some
mockery of a trial, but even of that there is no record. They were
forthwith done to death in the yard. Hume of Godscroft preserves the rude
rhyme which still rises in your memory as you see far over the plain that
ancient Castle Rock.
"Edinburgh Castell, toun and
tour,
God grant ye sinke for sinne;
And yat even for the back dinour,
Earl Douglas gat therein."
In 1753 coffin handles and plates of
gold were discovered near the scene of the execution. These were somewhat
fancifully supposed to mark the graves of the Douglases. Was this strange
and useless pomp an uneasy attempt to propitiate the shades of the
victims? Forty-two years pass, and again there is a deed of peculiar
horror. Albany, the brother of James III., lay in the Castle under
suspicion of treason. He invited the captain of the fortress to supper; he
stupefied his gaolers with drink, stabbed them to death, and with the help
of his single servant piled them on the huge fire of the room, where they
broiled in their armour. This brutality for its own sake, specially if it
hid some trick, or insult, is the most unpleasing feature of old
Scots life. Yet even Albany had a better side. His servant, descending the
Rock first, fell and broke his thigh. Albany carried him on his shoulder
two miles’ to Leith, whence both escaped by sea. The King refused to
believe until he had gazed with his own eyes on the scene of the exploit.
Yet a little time and James and Albany were completely reconciled, used
the same chamber, the same table, nay, the same bed. Under James III.
popular rumour was busy; much was heard of a certain black kist. It was
stuffed with jewels, it contained King Robert’s sarke—to wit, the Bruce’s
coat of mall. A less pleasant, and one hopes a less trustworthy rumour
credited James with an intention of collecting all the nobles of the
kingdom in the hall of the Castle and there making an end of what he could
not mend—repeating, as it were, the Douglas tragedy on a large scale; and
then (in 1488) himself was ended at Sauchieburn. His son, the gay, the
chivalrous James IV., held many a splendid tournament here. He sat on the
south side of the Rock, above where the King’s Stables Road still
preserves a faint memory of other days. Then it was all green field, and
there the combatants whacked one another, until (such was the invariable
course of events) the Scots knight had it all his own way. His opponent
lay at the last gasp, when James saved the situation by throwing his
plumed bonnet into the list, whereat the victor refrained. In sharp
contrast to all this feasting and pageantry there came, in 1513, Flodden
Field, and the reign ended in black disaster, and once more the King was
an infant.
Before the end of James V. the
Castle witnessed another terrible tragedy. On 17th July 1537 Jane Douglas,
Lady Glamis, convicted of practising sorcery to destroy the King, was
burned to death on the Castle Hill. Even that stern, rude age felt pity
for her beauty and her courage and hatred of the vile intrigues that
wrought her ruin. By a refinement of cruelty her husband, likewise a
prisoner, was permitted, or forced, to watch her destruction from his
adjacent cell. Next day, half mad, he made a frantic attempt to escape,
and was dashed to pieces on the rocks below.
And then came Mary Stuart and the
modern world. Those bare rooms where once she lived have suffered sad
changes. The setting was not unworthy of her gracious presence, for they
were splendid with tapestry where the skill of the needle had strangely
mingled scriptural and classical history with mediaval romance. They were
cultured with books, even if the collection was a like curious medley. The
catalogue of 43 volumes is still with us. There was Virgil and Livy,
Augustine, and other works of devotion, Amadis de Gaul, and Sir Lancelot
de Lake. The Lords of the Congregation looked askance at books and
tapestry alike: their serious souls suspected the devil beneath this
frivolity, Mary’s life is most connected with Holyrood, but here in this
chamber that now looks sheer down on the sordid life and mean cares of the
Grassmarket, though within sight as now of the hills beyond, she gave
birth, on 19th June 1566 to
her son James. The town went mad with joy; the cannon on the Rock blared
forth notes. of triumph; a thanksgiving was held in St Giles’; an uncouth
rhyme came to be in everyone’s mouth:
"Howe’er it happen for to fall,
The Lion shall be lord of all."
This was fathered on Thomas the
Rhymer, and though tiresome Lord Hailes long
afterwards proved it a forgery, what mattered? It had done its work and
vanished ere Hailes was born. It was thought well to intimate to Elizabeth
that she had an heir as well as Mary, so James Melville rode to London in
four days or so. Why this indecent haste? Elizabeth must have thought.
What she said is historic: "The Queen of Scots has a fair son, and
I am but a barren stock." For once the natural cry of the woman broke the
cold reserve of statecraft. At home the nation seemed united, yet the
preachers had some dismal croakings. By the devilish art of a Catholic
lady, the Countess of Athol, the pangs of childbirth were shifted from
Mary to the Lady Reres. A curious variant of the royal whipping-boy
tradition! Knox and his fellows might have bided their time. Mary, alas!
was presently to supply them with cause enough wherewith to croak and
fulminate at their hearts’ content; there was to be no lack of matter. But
Mary passes from the Castle, though Kirkaldy of Grange held it for her for
three years. He had been put there by the Regent Moray, but had swung
round entirely to Mary’s side, and by him was Lethington, the keen-witted
politician, who irritated Knox now and again to quite unseemly wrath. The
last days of the siege were terrible; three thousand cannon shot poured
into the devoted fortress; it was torn to pieces bit by bit; the oratory
of St Margaret, the Royal lodging on the east, and the Parliament Hall on
the south alone were left. There was no food to eat and no water to drink,
for the very wells were poisoned. There was nothing for it but
unconditional surrender. One curious touch marked the end. An English
force had aided Morton’s attack, but the Governor arranged with his deadly
Scots enemies that they and not the English should enter first. This to
save the honour of the Scots’ name, well nigh the only thing those mortal
foes had in common. Knox, however, retained a strong liking for Kirkaldy
of Grange, and had striven to bring him round again to his own side, but
failed. It was not the time, nor was Scotland the place, where prisoners
or their captors thought of mercy. On the 3rd August
1573 Kirkaldy was hanged "in the face of the
sun," as Knox had foretold on his death-bed, and under the shadow of those
walls he had so stoutly defended. Knox had mysteriously hinted at some
sign of grace at the last As Kirkaldy swung from his gibbet the sun came
forth from a cloud and flashed on his face; he slowly lifted his bound
hands and let them fall again. It was believed he had sought and found
mercy at this supreme moment. His head and the heads of his companions
were stuck high on the ruins. And now for a little the annals show a
lighter page.
On 17th June 1633 the Earl
of Mar entertained Charles I. to a great banquet in the hall. On the next
day he was conducted in Royal state from the Castle to Holyrood, where
with all the old splendid rites he was crowned King of Scotland, England,
France and Ireland. There was one jarring note. An embroidered crucifix
was noted hard by the altar, and
the Bishops’ genuflexions thereto "bred great fear of the inbringing of
popery." But the cause of the covenanters steadily gained strength, and
five years after Leslie took and held the Castle for them. And now it was
the turn of the Covenanting lords; a banquet was given to them in
the great hall, and a blue banner inscribed "For an oppressed Kirk and
broken Covenant" was displayed.
The Civil War was a time of peculiar
stress and strain, for the nation was profoundly divided against
itself. When Charles was beheaded and Cromwell was moving north, strange
visions flashed before the eyes of the people. Meteors formed like swords
glittered in the sky; spectral troops of horse marched across the hills;
and in the Castle a phantom drummer beat the rounds night after night,
till Dundas, the Governor, perplexed and dismayed, stood sentinel himself,
and with his own ears heard the old Scots march played by invisible hands
on an invisible drum, and there sounded in his ears the clang of
accoutrements and the tread of many soldiers, and the ghostly echoes
seemed to pass right by him, and then fade away in the distance, till
nothing was heard but the soughing of the drear midnight wind. But neither
men nor ghosts stayed the mighty Cromwell; he won Dunbar; he took the
Castle; he finally crushed the Royalists at the "crowning mercy of
Worcester," and for ten years England and Scotland alike were at peace
under his rule. The justice thereof, in the latter country, extorted
administration and respect - nay, there was something like enthusiasm. He
was feasted in his life, and after his death the rulers of
Edinburgh planned a statue for him in the Parliament Close. But the
Restoration came, and they thought better of it. The Dead Lion was burned
in effigy, and the Merry Monarch had the monument. You may see it to-day
in that same Parliament Close or Square, as they afterwards had it, under
the shadow of St Giles; the steed is almost spurning with its hind legs
the stone that marks the resting-place of Knox. "Odds fish!" sure Charles
muttered with a grin when he heard the story.
The next years are sad with the
memory of the Argylls. The Marquis had placed the Crown on the King’s
head, but he went from his prison in the Castle to the scaffold in 1661,
and his son, the Earl, was in that same prison in 1681, and only escaped
on the very eve of his projected execution. His fate was deferred, not
averted. In 1685 he was taken, after his abortive invasion of Scotland,
and placed in his old quarters, which he also left but to die. The
Revolution of 1688 followed, and long after Edinburgh, and nearly all
Scotland, had gone over to the new order, the Duke of Gordon held out
stoutly for King James. All the world knows, for has not Scott preserved
for us, in well-nigh the most romantic lines he ever penned, the memory of
this romantic period in Scots history? Claverhouse, with sixty horsemen,
rode proudly down (not the West Bow, however, but) the High Street, and
left the city by the Leith Wynd Port, and so along the Lang Gait,
afterwards the Lang Dykes, and now Princes Street. And then he climbed up
to the west sally port of the Castle for his Grace had been watching him
with a telescope and had signalled him with a red flag. You can still see
that sally port and you can imagine the terms of a conference of which
nothing is known, though tradition has handed down one striking phrase.
The Duke asked what course he would take: "Where’er the shade of Montrose
shall direct me," said Dundee as he descended the Rock.
"He waved his proud hand, and the trumpets were
blown,
The kettledrums clashed, and the horsemen rode on,
Till on Ravelstons’ cliffs, and on Clermistons’ Lee,
Died away the wild war-notes of Bonnie Dundee."
And so he moves on to his fate at
Killiecrankie, his memory enshrined in the passionate hate and the not
less passionate worship of men. In the meantime the Castle held stoutly
out. Heralds summoned the Duke again and again, but as they paraded before
him in all their finery he pleasantly asked, why had they not first turned
their coats? As he tossed them some guineas to drink the health of James
VII. perhaps they were not much
disturbed; at any rate the lost cause was not saved by an epigram. When
things pressed a certain John Grant volunteered to go forth to discover if
there was any hope of rescue, and when, after two day; he signalled from
the Lang Gait a decisive "No," it was felt that the end had come. On 13th
June 1689 the Castle for ever was
lost to the Stuart cause. The buildings were speedily repaired, and their
chief use hereafter was as a prison. Here was immediately confined the
Earl of Balcarres. During the night of the 27th July of that same year an
unseen hand drew the curtains of his bed, and Dundee appeared to his old
comrade "as beautiful as when he lived, with his long, dark, curled locks
streaming down over his laced buff coat and his left hand on his right
spule-blade, to hide the wound that the silver bullet had made." He said
nothing, but vanished from the Earl who called distractedly after him. At
that very hour, so Balcarres afterwards learned, Dundee was lying dead on
the far-off field of Killiecrankie. I have quoted this, as the reader may
recognise, from "Wandering Willie’s Tale" in Redgauntlet, for I
have always thought that Scott took his description there from the account
of this apparition. No doubt it was but a dream. In a professedly
materialistic book, Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and
Development, by Harriet Martineau and Henry George Atkinson it is
stated as an undoubted fact "that dying people have the power to influence
the minds of their friends at a distance, so that they are present, or
rather seem to be present before them." I cannot tell; we are not quite so
sure as we used to be that we have delimited exactly the boundaries of the
spirit world.
There is little else to say about
the Castle. There were several abortive plots to take it. In the Porteous
Mob it might have played a great part, but it did not, and the same may be
said of the episode of the ‘45. The residue of the chronicle is
indeed small beer. Let us off to Holyrood. |
