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As the road draws near Dunbar
it crosses a fair-sized burn, which at once disappears into the policies of
Broxmouth, the Duke of Roxburgh's seat, whence issuing from beneath the high
park wall on the further side, it runs at once into the sea, forming a
time-honoured hazard on the town golf links. This is the Brock or Broxburn,
that played a strategic part, and doubtless ran red with blood at the battle
of Dunbar, which in 1650 was fought upon this very spot. Charles II., it may
or may not be remembered, had been crowned King of Scotland immediately
after the execution of his father—not in any spasm of passionate loyalty,
but quite the reverse. The Scottish nation were then even more stoutly
opposed to the Stuarts and their ways than their neighbours, and from their
point of view had perhaps more cause to be. They were firmly convinced that
their religion, in its Presbyterian form of expression, was of divine
origin, and that the Almighty had made a special covenant with them as his
chosen agents, not merely to serve as a shining example to the nations of
the Reformed faith, but to enforce it either by persuasion or the sword, on
such of their neighbours as they could reach with either. Toleration of any
kind was anathema. But Charles II. was the only alternative to falling
politically under the now powerful English Government, an eventuality as
distasteful to the secular pride of the nation, as any form of creed but
their own was hateful to their robust religious fanaticism. Charles at this
moment had been some two months in Scotland—the squarest peg in the roundest
hole that could be found in the chronicles of all the kings. It simplified
matters something, however, that the young man was maintained practically as
a dummy under the strict surveillance of guardians, lay and clerical,
representing everything that his impious soul most abhorred. They in their
turn privately regarded him as an unclean and malignant instrument, a
veritable son of Belial, whom the servants of the Lord were unfortunately
compelled to make use of in furthering the designs of Heaven. Purged of all
his familiars good and bad, he was virtually a prisoner. If not enclosed in
prison walls, the social atmosphere of the saints, to whose exhortations he
was handed over, must have been fully as stifling. The historic malade du
pays of Queen Mary on first exchanging France for Holyrood must have been
trifling to the gloom of her great-grandson under somewhat similar
circumstances, deprived of those cakes and ale which alone comprised his
scheme of life, and thundered at by long-winded divines with scarcely any
pretension of respect. With his tongue in his cheek, however, he signed the
Covenant, there being no alternative, and put his name to papers embodying
everything he most loathed. Among other things he subscribed to the fact
that he was "deeply humbled and afflicted in spirit before God, because of
his father's opposition to the work of God." After which even this sardonic
humorist was moved to remark that he could never look his mother in the face
again. No doubt he was clever enough in his way, and philosophic enough to
find some consolation in the hope of better times to come. We all know how
such dreams, if he had them, were more than fulfilled; what a fine innings
he had from his own rather sordid point of view, and how ruthlessly he took
it out of the saints with his packed parliaments, his bishops, and the sword
of Claverhouse.
But the saints were paramount
at the time of Dunbar, for the simple reason that the moderates of all kinds
saw no safety for Scotland but in combination. All this business very
naturally brought Cromwell hotfoot to Scotland with his Ironsides. He had
some hopes of smoothing his path by pious appeals to brother Calvinists,
which to our latter-day notions seem much to the purpose. But to the godly
of the Covenant the Anabaptist and Independent saints of the south, who had
rejected the Presbyterian form of theocracy, were as unredeemed sons of
Belial as any Papist or Mahomedan. Cromwell's scriptural appeal to all God's
elect in Scotland to unite with the chosen from south of the Tweed fell on
deaf ears, while the hatred of the "Auld Enemy" had abated little or
nothing.
Cromwell's army entered
Scotland from Berwick late in July, and, as elsewhere mentioned, traversed
the Pease Pass, and, following the present route of road and rail travel,
arrived in due course before Edinburgh. It consisted of 16,000 men,
including 5000 horse, and was supported by an accompanying fleet. For a wet
and stormy month Cromwell was held in check by the skilful Leslie and a
Scottish army of 26,000 men, till after manoeuvres and counter-manoeuvres,
and the loss of 5000 of his small but fine army, mainly from sickness, he
found himself back at Dunbar in an extremely awkward predicament. Leslie's
policy had been to avoid a pitched battle, and it had answered admirably.
Cromwell had offered him battle at Haddington on ground of his own choosing,
which the astute Scottish general had declined. But he stuck to the heels of
the English, and was now encamped upon Doon Hill, an outlier of the
Lammermoors, which rises nearly 500 feet out of the red East Lothian fields,
about a mile from the spot where we are now in fancy standing.
The Scottish army were now
between Cromwell and his difficult line of retreat through the Pease Pass,
and would have made even his escape by sea no easy matter. But Leslie had
his difficulties too, of which the now ascendant minister's were
unquestionably the worst. A purging of his army on the lines of theological
opinion had been insisted upon at Edinburgh in face of this redoubtable foe,
with the result that some three to four thousand of some nine thousand
efficient men and officers had been summarily ejected. A further expulsion
of "malignant suspects" was now insisted upon. According to a Royalist
writer, the army was left in charge of "ministers' sons, clerks, and other
such sanctified creatures, who had hardly ever seen or heard of any sword,
but that of the spirit." This purging went on till the very eve of the
battle. Cromwell's saints, on the other hand, were probably the best troops
at that time in the world, but they were less than half their opponents in
numbers, and still sickening fast. The Scots on Doon Hill were in no very
good plight, for it was raining heavily; but their position was virtually
impregnable. Cromwell saw this well enough, and recognised how precarious
was his own.
lie was lodged at Broxmouth
House, and had called his rather despondent officers to that strange blend
of prayer meeting and council of war which preceded so many of his trenchant
efforts against Amalekites of all kinds. He alone apparently, "and he often
loved to talk of it afterwards," says Burnet, "felt a strange enlargement of
heart, and that God had certainly heard them." He and his staff were walking
in the garden afterwards, and watching the Scottish camp through their
glasses, when to their amazement and delight they saw the enemy preparing to
descend the hill, which they subsequently did, to take up a position between
its foot and the Brox burn. Every one knows how Cromwell took his glass from
his eye with the laconic and historic remark, " God hath delivered them into
our hands; they are coming down to us." The ministers seem to have been the
evil genius of this fatal movement, made against the judgment, it is said,
of Leslie himself, and the veteran Leven, who was with him. But the
preachers were having their day, and were as ready to take command against
Cromwell as against the invisible legions of Satan. Further exhorting on the
hilltop had worked them up into a state of ecstatic confidence in which mere
earthly tactics were of slight consideration. They had the divine assurance,
they told the army, of victory. In short, their spiritual wrestlings had
reduced the issue to a certainty. On the eve of any other battle in credible
history, such a company would have been laid by the heels as intolerably
meddlesome lunatics. But in the atmosphere they had created Leslie was
overborne. Cromwell himself could personate a Hebrew prophet with the best
of them, which adds irony to the situation, with the difference that he
dropped the part when it came to business, and became a soldier and a
statesman.
It had rained all night, and
about daybreak Cromwell's bugles sounded the advance. A regiment of horse,
and two regiments of infantry crossed the burn with some opposition, and
were followed by the whole army, when without loss of time a general attack
was delivered. Two Scottish regiments made a brave resistance and were
killed to a man where they stood, but the rest of the host broke almost at
once before the onset of Cromwell's horse and foot, and as the sun rose the
battle had already melted into a general rout. "Let God arise and his
enemies be scattered," exclaimed Cromwell, and the pursuit began. Of 23,000
Scots, 3000 were slain, and 10,000 taken prisoners. The latter, like those
of Worcester, "the crowning mercy," fought on the very same day in the next
year, were herded together, driven south under cruel conditions, which
greatly reduced their numbers, and shipped to the American plantations. The
victory at Dunbar gave Cromwell the possession of Edinburgh. It broke up the
domination of the religious extremists, released Charles, who retired north
from their clutches, and brought about an alliance between the moderates
headed by Argyle and the old Royalists of the more northern counties and
elsewhere, under the king who had been crowned at Scone.
Through the first half of
1651, Cromwell, in possession of the country up to Edinburgh, was pressing
Charles and the Scottish army to the northward. how the latter, being hard
pushed, eventually made a rush southward, hoping to raise the English
Royalists, was followed by Cromwell, and then caught and crushed at
Worcester on the anniversary of Dunbar, is a more familiar story. It is only
relevant here as illustrating the importance of the victory on this mile of
tillage land between the Brox burn and Doon hill, where the infatuated
saints had forced Leslie to take up such a fatal position.
The royal borough and seaport
of Dunbar has smartened up amazingly since my earlier acquaintance with it,
which was fairly intimate. It knew little, I think, in those days, of a
summer season, though possibly it had already found room for a few visitors
from Edinburgh. So famous a place historically, where then, too, more
regularly than now, with all its newly acquired fashion, the northern fast
trains halted, could not be insignificant. But it wore, I well remember, a
rather dead-alive look, hardly worthy of that great and prosperous country
around it, which made Haddington such a stirring place on market days. The
latter has now fallen from its high estate, while Dunbar has expanded
westward in streets, and rows, and terraces, and beyond these into private
villas, that bear ample testimony to the success of its later aspirations.
The broad, straight, cobbled High Street, with its tall, rather grim
old-fashioned houses, has changed nowise, however, save for the greater
bustle that rattles and echoes along it. The quaint old gabled town-hall,
with its hexagonal tower and extinguisher spire, still remains. So does the
huge barrack-looking house at the end, once the mansion of the Earls of
Lauderdale, and afterwards, what its appearance suggests, a military
barracks. The old fishing quarters towards the harbour have altered little,
and are picturesque enough if you can attune yourself to the asperity of
appearance which is almost inseparable from all northern dwellings of the
humbler urban sort. In former days, it seemed to me that one's horse's feet
upon the cobbles used to wake the echoes of as quiet a place as might be
found. From a recently renewed acquaintance, it comes back to memory as a
lively hubbub of motors, and traps, and cycles, and quite a stir of
pedestrians, local and alien.
But the face of East Lothian,
fat plain or wild moor, has altered nothing. Its farms, mansions, villages,
and cottages are in detail and appearance precisely as they were during the
Franco-Prussian war—almost pathetically so to those who can remember what
these same fields and buildings then stood for, the agricultural high-water
mark of a proud, envied, uncriticised, landed system. And now in spite of
the apparent paradox, and of having passed in the interlude through the
fiery furnace, such as the passing stranger would little dream of, they
still represent the high-water mark of the system, now a discredited one,
unduly and hastily discredited beyond a doubt. But that is neither here nor
there, and is inevitable in a shop-keeping country, where the bulk of the
educated and articulate class are utterly divorced from any practical
knowledge of the soil. And surely over nothing else in the world can an
otherwise clever and able man make such a complete fool of himself, and
remain so long a fool, and do so much harm if he has the chance as in the
apparently simple but the infinitely intricate science of rural economy.
The small farm, rightly or
wrongly, is now the popular prescription for the ills of a congested little
island that has cultivated shop-keeping and bricks and mortar, and imported
food so assiduously that its soil area has become insignificant for its
monstrous population. Relief, so far as it goes, is obviously of infinite
interest, whatever the soundness of the prescription. But what does this
last amount to? The increase of the population of Great Britain in one
single year, would numerically neutralise a movement back on to the land,
upon a scale such as the most sanguine theorists with a normal sense of
proportion have not ventured upon. Whether East Lothian could carry more
people I do not know; but no one with eyes in his head could so much as look
at it and imagine that under a patchy system it would produce as much per
acre to the wealth of the country as it does to-day, with high rents, high
wages, high yields, and, let us hope, reasonable profits. To hand over such
a country as this, with all the further outlay involved, to the tender
mercies of the small cultivator with practically no capital, would surely be
fatuous. At any rate, large farming, landlordism, and all the rest of it, is
a more or less vaguely discredited system nowadays, by that •outside
element, which is not equipped for judgment, though unfortunately for the
country, or for any country, by far the most numerous. British agriculture
is very generally supposed to be decadent, regardless, or more often
unconscious of the elementary fact that we still grow more grain per acre
than any country in the world, and that our farmers as stock-breeders easily
lead the world. Misconceptions are natural enough when there are otherwise
sane people prepared to tell an audience quite ignorant of these things,
that if a field is in grass instead of in wheat, it represents a kind of
conspiracy to defraud the people of their food, and who honestly believe a
flock of sheep to be useless interlopers, to the exclusion of humanity ! I
wonder what proportion of the British nation would be genuinely surprised to
learn that sheep are a vital ingredient of the machinery through which the
"people's food" can be grown in this country. Rightly or wrongly, the great
farmer is out in the shade, nor any longer accounted an object of pride to
every true Briton as a peculiarly British institution. There is a fixed
notion in towns and cities that he and his capital, and his labourers, could
be advantageously supplanted by the small farmer. As "occupiers" only, say
the Radicals, as ownership might spell Toryism; as owners, say the
Conservatives, who must go with the stream, for that very reason. In the
counties of Great Britain traditionally occupied by small farmers, with
trifling exceptions there you find the most unproductive land and inferior
live-stock, which last is equivalent to waste. They may be happy, but they
are generally bad farmers. If this were not sufficiently obvious, the
sceptical can purchase for four-pence the annual official returns per acre
of every county, where the facts are writ large. As to the contrast in
live-stock, it is written on the face of the country sufficiently clearly
for any one who runs to read. In conclusion, it would be at least as
accurate as epigrammatic to say that, whereas the Dane once came to school
in East Lothian, East Lothian, or Great Britain at any rate, is now told to
go to school with the Dane. I knew personally in old days, several Danes and
Swedes, landowners' sons mostly, sitting at the feet of East Lothian
farmers, some of whom must have lived to see the tables turned.
But if the fields of Lothian
have altered nothing since then, half the sea-coast is transformed. From
Dunbar to North Berwick, and from North Berwick to Gullane and Aberlady,
Edinburgh, reinforced to some extent by Glasgow, has stretched an almost
continuous chain of habitations. The old quiet nine-hole golf courses of
North Berwick, Dunbar, Archerfield, and Gullane, have expanded into nearly a
dozen full-length courses, the resort of thousands from all parts of the
country, and from across the seas. The fertile farms of East Lothian filter
out as they draw near the shore into a thin sandy belt of tillage, which
abuts here and there for long distances upon rolling sand dunes and
intervening strips of sheep-nibbled turf such as the golfer loves; and
beyond the thin sward and the dunes the sea makes fine play upon red reefs
of rock and low rugged promontories and interludes of golden sand. Here in
old days the Scottish golfer propelled the feather ball, and later on its
gutty successor, with swan-necked clubs, over short courses pretty much as
nature had made them but for the mellowing influence of the tramp of many
feet and the brushing of natural greens. The links on which the Dunbar
course is laid out fringe the low rocky shore to the east of the town. It
seemed strange playing over them again, after such a gulf of years, and
vainly endeavouring to recall the less elaborate and much shorter course of
primitive times of which the stone wall hazard at "The Vaults" and the Brox
burn alone remained as salient features. But the pleasant sea-girt nature of
both the out and in journey, the gorgeous colouring of the rocks, the stern
headland of St. Abb's, closing the wide outlook to the east, and the old
town upon the west;—these, at any rate, required no effort of memory, and I
soon abandoned all futile groping after obliterated details upon the
eighteen-hole course of to-day.
Dunbar—though even as I write
the restless up-to-date golf architect may possibly be at work—would seem to
be tacitly acquiesced in as the happy hunting-ground of the duffer, the
conservative, and the middling player. The eight to fourteen handicap man
finds it a quite sufficient test of his abilities ; while the numerous and
wholly unambitious remnant can whack round with far less tribulation than
upon the stretched-out and bunkered-up courses just to the westward. Dunbar
is not for the modern scratch and plus man. It is the pleasant stamping
ground rather of that vast majority to whom the great game still offers
seductive difficulties apart from mere bunkers—men to whom the full-length
drive, according to their capacity and their accuracy of approach, is not
yet and never will be reduced to anything like a monotony of precision.
It is only for a small
minority that recent golf architecture has any true significance. It merely
causes the mass of players to use their niblicks oftener, which in itself is
not an advantageous item, or confronts them with the frequent alternative of
playing short after a meritorious shot (for them), or straining at a fluky
one. If they cover the mere length and possibly intervening hazard, there is
no pretension to any control over the ball when it reaches the much-bunkered
green, which in truth is not laid out for such a shot, but for a well-judged
one with an iron club by a first-class player from the closer distance at
which his longer drive placed his ball. Playing short is all very well, and
is, of course, a time-honoured device in the game, but chiefly as the
sequel, and in a sense penalty, to an indifferent shot. That is all right.
But as a necessary proceeding for the average man, perhaps, several times in
a round, if he really wants to win his match, it is not golf. Of course, he
much more often doesn't do this, but slashes away freely, and is even
secretly pleased, if by an unusual effort he more than succeeds in his
length, and runs over the green into the cavernous corner of a bunker
beyond. He will almost certainly remark unblushingly to his adversary, that
it was bad luck, and the other, who has played short by design or accident,
if also only a moderate player, will very likely half agree with him, as
with an easy pitch somewhere on to the green, he divides or wins the hole.
This again is not golf for either party. The man with the iron club, for
whom this hole was laid out, would not bewail his luck if he were bunkered
beyond the green, but would simply recognise that he had miserably failed.
All this does not seriously matter. But it is a great revolution that all
the good courses should be altered to test the play of one-twentieth of the
golfing world, to the frequent dislocation of distances for the bulk of it.
It is never, of course, the long carries from the tee, which in any case
seem to have gone out of fashion, that are beyond the compass of the average
player, but so many of the second shots, which either he cannot attempt at
all, or must slash at with the wrong club. This of course detracts, or
should detract if he has any regard for the game, just so much from his
enjoyment of the round. There probably is no help for the situation. The
fatal moment of weakness which let in the American core ball did the whole
business. But when one comes to think of .it, it is rather a novel idea that
nineteen members out of every twenty in a good club play on a course laid
out for the odd twentieth.
There used to be a
superstition in the south that every Scotsman was a good, or a fairly good,
golfer. Even now, I fancy, a majority of southern golfers are quite unaware
that the game belonged purely to the east coast of Scotland, and that the
men of Dumfries or Ayr, of Glasgow or of the Highlands, speaking broadly,
only adopted it recently, as Englishmen have adopted it. So colossal was the
artlessness on this point, that at the annual dinner in London of a large
club of which the writer was a member in the 'nineties, the ceremony was
invariably opened by the solemn perambulation of the banquet hall by a
Highlander in full war-paint, playing a skirl on the bagpipes. This was
honestly regarded by two hundred educated Englishmen and golfers as
symbolically appropriate and suggestive of the royal and ancient and
intensely lowland game, and of the atmosphere of St. Andrews, Musselburgh,
or North Berwick.
The Scottish golfer of
to-day, as is only natural, exhibits the same wide variety and the same
average capacity as his English neighbours, the only sensible difference
being that the game reaches lower down the social scale, so far, at least,
as that is represented by money. It is not necessary in Eastern Scotland, as
in England, to belong to a club, which is unavoidably limited in numbers,
and inevitably more or less ex-elusive. Practically all the old Scottish
courses arc open to any one who chooses to pay a shilling or two for a day
ticket, at a box by the first tee. There are clubs and clubhouses on most
links, but a considerable proportion of the players have no connection with
them. There are also numbers of golf clubs in Edinburgh and elsewhere, just
as there are fishing clubs, who hold their competitions on any course that
suits them, or that gives them particular facilities. Dunbar, then, though
not accounted a classic course, and held in some scorn by the scratch
player, is nevertheless a true sand course, fringing, in fact, the very
shore—of quite a good length, too, and well suited to the ordinary
performer, for whom it appears in a manner to be set apart. Really bad
southern players, when they make their northern pilgrimage in the holiday,
generally prefer to swell the crowd upon the classic courses, where they
must be as unhappy themselves as a nuisance to others, though, I believe,
moral support is to be found in the number of others of the like sort, and
the like unaccountable infatuation. But after all, the whole standard of
play is enormously raised. The old stock jokes—not the original Scotch ones,
but those of the southern boom period—still do duty in the comic papers; but
they must emanate from pens and pencils out of touch with present
conditions. Red-faced, peppery colonels no longer dig away and blaspheme
interminably in bunkers, nor do impossible vulgarians in bizarre attire any
longer play the utter imbecile in their caddies' eyes that the belated
artist would still have us believe. The suburban courses, and, indeed, most
courses, were rich in such spectacles and such incidents ten and twenty
years ago. Possibly August may still provide some humoursome sights, even by
the seaside. Perhaps some very provincial courses may still yield up their
treasures, but I doubt it. The duffer of to-day, on the stretched-out and
bunkered courses, with his consistent sixes and sevens, may try the patience
of the pair or foursome behind him, but he is neither bad enough, nor
eloquent enough to be funny, and in the near past would have been accounted
a quite respectable performer on his comparatively untormented pilgrimage
round a southern course. The farcical element, who made copy, and whose
phantoms still make copy for the newspapers, have died out or been literally
driven from the courses by a new generation of slashing youngsters.
Dunbar in its present
condition is adapted to the average type of player, whether young or old. It
is quite certain that the better man among them would oftener win on such a
green than on a championship course, or its near equivalent, and surely this
is a good test. It is not only the occasional holes which tempt the slightly
better of two moderates to take risks, which are obviously fluky, rather
than play short after a creditable drive, but in some other respects the
element of luck is greater in the case of players negotiating a course a
good deal of which is beyond both their powers to play—as it is laid out to
be played.
Throughout the Middle Ages
Dunbar, with its strong castle, its situation upon the sea, and on the
landward approach from England, was in the thick of the ceaseless
hurly-burly. To touch upon the men of might who flung one another in turn
out of its wave-washed walls, would he to list the names of every king,
baron, and hero, on either side of Tweed, who assisted in the bloody tale of
Scottish history. It gave title to a long succession of earls, who played
their part in the defence of the Eastern March with interludes of alliance
with the national foe, when their personal pride was touched, or their
private interests served. The reader's interest is much more likely to be
engaged by the reminder that Queen Mary came here with Darnley after the
Rizzio murder, riding on a palfrey behind Erskine, "who was much missed by
the godly." Later on, infatuated or hypnotised by the strong-willed swarthy
scoundrel who wrecked her life, she came here with him. For Bothwell then
owned Dunbar and many other properties in the county. Here, under these
compromising circumstances, he instituted proceedings for the divorce from
his wife, Lord Huntly's sister, the only woman, it is said, he ever felt
affection and respect for. From Dunbar they returned to Edinburgh, and to
that marriage at Holyrood, which was celebrated on May 15th, almost within
three months of Darnley's murder in the Kirk o' Field. Driven from the
capital by public opinion and the menace of their enemies, the pair were
back at Dunbar in three weeks, and in the middle of June marched with such
forces as they could raise, to meet the Confederate Lords at Carberry Hill.
The agreement there made placed Mary in their hands, and left Bothwell the
opportunity to escape with his life, but nothing more.
The end of this unscrupulous
and forceful member of the House of Hepburn, the very apotheosis of a type
of Scottish baron then drawing to its end, was characteristic and dramatic.
The Scottish government made later attempts to catch him, but he seems to
have adopted the career of a corsair in the Shetlands, to die eventually in
a Danish prison. The castle of Dunbar was soon after dismantled; but in the
next century the town was famous for its herring fisheries, and the great
number, not only of Scotch, but of Dutch vessels that gathered there. The
castle is now but a worn, shapeless mass of fragments, seated on rugged red
rocks of trap, through which a way has been cut for the sea to surge into
the harbour. When it is said that the town in the Napoleon wars, and later,
saw a good deal of garrison and military life, and has ever since been a
yeomanry and militia centre, there is not much of general interest
remaining. The rock
formation along the coast,
upon both sides of Dunbar, is beautiful in detail for its vivid colouring,
and striking for the jagged, rugged outline, whether of cliff or reef, with
which it ceaselessly frets the wonderfully transparent seas. In what. high
regard it is held among geologists might be guessed at by a glance at the
manner in which the various strata of formation are exposed all along the
coast: cliffs of trap, ledges of red, white, and yellow sandstone, and slabs
of bluish limestone. There are beds of petrified shells, and corals, and
rocks of porphyritic greenstone. There is a good deal of columnar work, too,
about the harbour, of a kind similar to that which on a great scale has made
Staffa and the Giant's Causeway notorious. West of the castle and harbour
are craggy cliffs of trap, succeeded by cliffs, and then by ledges, of red
and white sandstone. The large parish church of red sandstone, with its
lofty tower and expansive breadths of perpendicular window, stands raised
well up at the eastern fringe of the town, and can be seen for miles. This
is modern, being not yet a century old, but its predecessor, which was
wholly destroyed, seems to have been a cruciform building, largely of
twelfth or thirteenth century date, and richly endowed as a collegiate
church in the fourteenth century by one of the earls of Dunbar.
Nearly three centuries later
the body of George Home, the last Earl of Dunbar, High Treasurer of
Scotland, Knight of the Garter, and Privy Councillor to James I. in England,
was brought here from London for burial. The only object of interest in the
church is his magnificent mural monument, nearly thirty feet high. It is of
marble, fashioned with all that lavish wealth of ornamentation which
distinguished the tombs of the great, and, in the south, of many who were
not great, at that period. The last earl, of life size, robed and in armour,
kneels in prayer upon a cushion. beneath a lofty and profusely decorated
canopy. A life-size mailed figure stands upon a pedestal on either hand,
while beneath the frescoed canopy, bearing symbolic figures, an inscription
on black marble commemorates this militant agent in the irritating policy of
the first and sixth James.
It is a ten-mile stage from
Dunbar to Haddington upon the North road, which, pursuing a north-east
course all the way from Berwick to Dunbar, there turns due east, and holds
that course for the last thirty miles to Edinburgh. For the first half of
the stage to Haddington, road and railway, still in near company, push
forward with unswerving precision along an almost level seacoast strip, till
both leap in near company the rocky gorge of the Tyne at East Linton, and,
for the first time seriously diverging, pursue their several ways to the
northern capital. Here, just beyond Dunbar, the estuary of this same East
Lothian Tyne takes quite a bite out of the otherwise rock-bound coast. It is
the first break of this kind north of Tweed. The water of Biel, whose infant
streams amid the woods of Nunraw and Whittinghame we gazed upon from the top
of the Lammermoors in a former chapter, here babbles beneath our road into
Belhaven Bay, and helps to swell the interval of sand-bars and shallow tides
and marshy shore. But the rich red lands, stiff with their clean crops, and
for this stage of the road relieved and diversified with groves and woods as
opulent as the crops, shut out all actual detail of this low sandy sea-line.
Across the heavy-laden grainfields; over the great broad rectangles of
potato land, thigh deep in their dark green covering of shaughs; beyond the
flickering blue-green tops of the thick clustering swedes, or the paler
pastures, where heavy Border Leicesters or their crosses are lazily grazing
the rye grass and clover ley and tramping it hard for the autumn ploughing;
over such foregrounds, and between the woods, you can mark the indeterminate
line of the shore, and the gleam of the sea beyond fading into the famous
far-spreading woods of Tynninghame.
The Lammermoors are still but
some half-dozen miles from the coast, and into this long wedge what a wealth
of rural abundance is crowded. With all its triumphs of fatness, and
astonishing thrift of tillage, this part of East Lothian, and that, too, the
richest part, cannot help being in a way beautiful. Even without the
overhanging moors striking their ever-present note of contrast on the one
hand, and the constant neighbourhood of a rock-fretted sea upon the other,
the atmosphere would be a stately and imposing one for the Devonian
colouring of the soil, the much more than Devonian colouring of its produce,
the variety and opulence of the woods. The surprising assertions here and
there, too, of primitive nature, in the shape of upstanding, untamable
hills, shaggy with gorse and grey outcropping rock; the murmur here and
there of rushing trout-streams, that, as in the Merse, cut their way through
bosky glens which have defied the plough, or that the care of some
neighbouring country scat have cherished in more than their native beauty.
But even so, there is no call whatever to thus cut a picture out of its
frame of hills and sea. At any rate, this half of East Lothian, and, in a
modified degree, the whole of it, is at least unique. However it might
strike the stranger, there is nothing resembling it, taken as a whole,
elsewhere in Scotland, and assuredly nothing approaching its equivalent
anywhere in England. This pious opinion, I need hardly remark, is not
expressed as applying to the ordinary standards of physical scenery, but
purely to its aloofness in many characteristics from ordinary landscapes.
From Cumberland to Cambridge, or from Derbyshire to Aberdeen, there is no
tract of country like it in the sense that all other districts have more or
Iess their prototypes. In most parts of modern Scotland, one has to forego
the hundred and one details of landscape, due to mellower conditions and
older rural civilisation, a generally softer climate, and, above all, to a
less vigorously economic treatment of the soil, and to find compensation in
a rather altered point of view. But East Lothian, its eastern half more
particularly, seems to have a quality of its own that even with all its
ruthless trimness and fatness of foreground compels one's respectful
admiration.
If there is now little
continuity of occupation among the tenantry of East Lothian, prodigious as
have been their collective achievements within the brief compass of a
century, in few countries have the old landed families been less uprooted.
Hays and Hepburns, Bairds, Sutties, Kerrs, Kinlochs, and other names of
immemorial association are all still here. The no'ons homo seems scarcely in
evidence. Small lairds, without doubt, were wiped out by the dozen, during
the scientific development of agriculture in the cult of the great estate
and the large farm. The small laird of provincial habit and attachments was
practically extinct here seventy or eighty years ago. It is a country
essentially of big things, of great estates, and long rent-rolls. Many of
the farmers in former days were richer men than scores of Welsh and
west-country squires.
Close to Linton, by the
roadside, stand the ample farm buildings, the well-embowered mansion-house
of Phantassie. One of the largest farms in the county—some eight or nine
hundred acres of arable land—it was for long associated with the name of the
Rennies, one of whom, nearly a century ago, introduced the shorthorn into
the Lowlands, while his brother was the famous engineer. Close by, too,
lived and died Andrew Meikle, who was the virtual inventor of the threshing
machine. East Linton, a rather dour but large and important village, stands
upon a high bank above the Tyne, which having sung its winding way through
the heart of East Lothian, now draws towards its sober end. It is making
just here its last serious play in a rocky cleft over which the old stone
bridge carries the North road into the village. Just above the latter,
affording a delightful but momentary glimpse from the train window, as it
strides the adjacent viaduct, is a deep green glen, down which, and visible
for a long distance upward, comes coursing the bright waters of the river. A
felicitous illustration is here of those frequent relapses into untamed
Arcady which, as I have said, yield such pleasant surprises, amid the lush,
orderly landscape of East Lothian. It struck me also, on revisiting the once
familiar spot, as a happy example of the unchanged condition of all this
countryside, despite its still unchallenged supremacy in things material.
Though adjoining a large village seated on the main railroad, during all
these decades nothing up the glen seemed to have altered in the smallest
essential detail. The gorse bloomed upon the steep grassy side of the brae
unchecked as of yore, and there was the line of well-remembered willows,
huge specimens of their kind, that in the first days of the spring trouting
made great hopeful splashes of whity-grey against the still wintry woods.
With most of us there are scenes that for no conspicuous reason remain
always in the foreground of memory; and these noble willows, waving their
grey harbingers of spring over the black eddies of the Tyne, black to
peculiarity from the nature of the rocky bottom, have come back to me
hundreds of times in many lands, and by scores of other streams often far
more beautiful. I somehow expected to find them cut down or shrivelled with
the weight of years. But there they still were in all their glory, not
shaking out on this occasion, to be sure, the catkins of early April, but
merging their late summer foliage in the woody background. An old mill
higher up the valley, to be sure, had vanished. So, with the removal of its
dam, had the long, still stretch of dead water above it. The river now ran
its natural rippling course, and no longer
lingered between brimming
banks, beneath the ancient castle of Hailes. For I should not have thus
ventured to bring the reader up here, or strained his goodwill perhaps, with
these reminiscent philanderings, but for the saving fact that the hoary
ruins of Hailes Castle rise here above the stream, which now ripples between
uplifted banks, where it once slept in quiet and brim-ruing depths, and
caught the shadows of the red walls and the riotous foliage that chokes
them. This was, of old, a fortress of renown. Bothwell once owned it, and
local tradition, when I used to come a-fishing up here, held stoutly that
lie brought Queen Diary hither. This is more than probable, as it lay right
in the path between Dunbar and Edinburgh. One used also to be told, however,
by the natives, that it was by Traprain Law, which raises its great humpy,
rocky shoulder many hundreds of feet in the immediate back round, that she
fell into the hands of her enemies. The tradition had it that in skirting
the hill, as she thought, upon the safe side, it proved the reverse, and so
brought her into their very arms. This did well enough, and was accepted and
retained with thankfulness by ingenuous youth with an uncritical fancy for
such things.
But unhappily it does not
march with historical fact, and is only interesting as an example of the
curious drift, of oral tradition. The ivied fragments of the red sandstone
towers of Hailes are high enough to frown above the tangle of ash and
willow, and alder and oak, which choke it upon the riverside, while rank
grasses, nettles, and wild flowers, riot over the mounds which mark the site
of vanished buildings, and their defences. The garden of a neighbouring
house occupies what was once no doubt the courtyard. At the time of the
Hertford invasion of Scotland it belonged to the Earl of Bothwell, and is
described by Patten as "a proper house of great strength." It seems to have
passed out of the hands of the Hepburns with the disastrous extinction of
the later Earl of Bothwell, Queen Mary's evil genius, though the family are
still seated at Smeaton in the neighbourhood. Two towers and a fair
elevation of connecting curtain still peer above or blink through the tangle
of foliage upon the shrunken stream below, though, judging from an old
print, the last century must have worked more than common havoc upon this
grim relic of a stormy age. |
