| The latter days of King David were darkened
by a great sorrow. His life till now had been singularly unclouded by misfortune. In most
things he had a fair measure of success. His foreign policy displayed ability and tact:
his internal administration was wise and upright, bating the tremendous error of his
church policy—a considerable deduction however. His qualities as a hero procured him
respect in the eyes of all the sovereigns of his time, and his devotion to his duties as a
ruler, and his love of country, joined to a noble simplicity of a character, and an
unaffected frankness and accessibility, made him the idol of his people. Not in his own
days only but even in ours, he remains a conspicuous figure in the long line of our royal
personages. As the result of this combination of qualities, not the monarch only, but the
country of Scotland stood out in bulkier proportions and bolder relief before the rest of
Christendom than it had done for some centuries previous. To crown his satisfaction, David
had the prospect, when his days should be fulfilled, of transmitting the sceptre of a
kingdom, which, now placed on a settled basis, gave promise of flourishing, to his only
son Henry, Prince of Northumberland. Prince
Henry had already given proof of his capacity to govern, and his virtues had endeared him
to his father, and not less to the nation, who rejoiced to think that when King David
should go hence his throne would be filled by a prince so worthy to succeed him. But this
bright prospect was suddenly overcast by an unexpected stroke that befell the royal house.
Prince Henry, the heir of all this power, sickened and died (1142), and the bitter task of
the father was to lay in the grave, in the prime of life, that son who had ever stood
before his imagination as wearing his crown and swaying his sceptre when he himself should
be resting in the tomb.
With Prince Henry the joy of David’s
heart and the happiness of his life departed. Age had already dimmed his eye when this
shadow fell to deepen the gloom and sadness which years after bring with them. From this
moment the landscape was less fair to one who had always found in the aspects of nature
one main source of enjoyment, and who had often turned from the cares of his kingdom to
find relaxation in the cultivation of his flowers and the engrafting of his fruit trees.
His life, too, came within the shadow of this eclipse, as well what of it was past as the
much briefer space that lay before him. Where the father had sowed in toil and anxiety,
the son, coming after him, was to reap in peace, so David confidently expected. But the
prince who should have been the inheritor of the fruits of all these labours had gone to
the grave, and his removal had written "vanity and vexation" upon all the
endeavours and achievements of David. The blow was all the heavier to both king and people
from the circumstance that the three sons of the deceased prince were of tender age, and
it was impossible not to forecast that much of what the wise and patriotic monarch had won
for Scotland would be put in peril, and it might be wholly lost, by the weakness and the
inexperience, or by the blunders or the crimes of a young reign. Such
were the heavy clouds that obscured the
evening of a day which during its currency had enjoyed a larger amount of sunshine than
was the average experience of the monarchs of that time.
David, feeling that his end was not now
distant, began to prepare for his departure by setting his kingdom in order. It was now
that he was able to estimate the full extent of the loss he had sustained in the death of
his son Henry. Summoning his three grandchildren into his presence, he declared the
eldest, Malcolm the undoubted heir of the throne. To William, the second, he assigned the
principality of Northumberland, and to David, the youngest, he bequeathed the Earldom of
Huntingdon, his family inheritance. He charged the nobility to give effect to the royal
will touching the succession, and in particular, he recommended Malcolm to the care of
Macduff, Earl of Fife, the man of greatest influence among the Scottish nobles. Taking
with him the young prince, Macduff made the circuit of the kingdom, and showed Malcolm to
the nation as their future sovereign.1 It was some consolation
to the aged monarch, whose heart was still bleeding from his recent grief, to know who
would sit upon his throne after him, and that he had prepared the way for his undisputed
succession. These arrangements concluded, David was left free to engage in more solemn
preparations for his departure from earth. He had often contended on the battle field, but
now he was to engage in conflict with an enemy against whom a coat of mail and a sword of
steel could afford him no defence. He must arm himself with quite different weapons. He
multiplied his acts of devotion, and spent his days and nights in prayer. He was now
residing in Carlisle. He had been partial to this city all life long; and now, in the
evening of his day, he came thither, that here his eyes might close for the last time on
all earthly scenes. The environments of this city, ore akin to the landscapes with which
he had been familiar in his youth than the rugged if grander aspects of his more northern
dominions; the meadows spread around its walls; the soft flowing Dee, that waters them,
and the genial breezes from the western ocean must have had a soothing influence on both
mind and body of one who to the burden of state, which he had long borne, had now
superadded the burden of old age. When the priests saw that his last day was near they
offered to have the sacrament brought to him in his chamber. The King would in nowise
suffer it so to be; on the contrary, he made himself be carried to the church and received
the sacrament at the altar. Expressing a wish to enter the Kingdom where all the
inhabitants are kings, he clasped his hands as in prayer, and breathed his last. King
David died on the 24th of May 1153, having reigned twenty-nine years, two
months, and three days. The royal remains were carried to Dunfermline, and there interred
with becoming pomp and splendour.
The character of David it is not easy to
paint. To delineate the various qualities of which it was made up, to pronounce judgment
upon them one by one, to be laudatory here, and critical or condemnatory there, were easy
enough; but to balance nicely and accurately, and from numerous diverse qualities to educe
a unity, and from conflicting and discordant passions and aims to extricate and establish
the one predominating characteristic which differentiates the man from all others, and
make the one accomplished result of his life stand out from lesser issues is not so easy.
It is neither the dissecting power of analysis, nor the constructive art of synthesis that
can enable us to do this; it is only the slow revealing light of Time that can aid us
here. Had we stood by the grave of King David when his dust was being lowered into it, we
would have found nothing but panegyric to pronounce over him. We would have spoken of him,
as doubtless those who stood around his tomb spoke of him, as the patriotic King, the
lover of his people, the accomplished knight and warrior, the upright and wise
administrator, and, it may be, the reformer of religion. But the hour of death, or the day
of burial, when virtues only are remembered and faults are forgotten, is not the time to
weigh calmly and dispassionately the characters of men who have occupied public, and
especially royal station; nor is it the time to forecast the issues to spring from their
lives. A good character is like a good tree, it bringeth forth good fruit: but we must
wait till the fruit has been ripened, and then we may pronounce upon its quality. If the
fruit is acrid, or if it is poisonous we may be sure, however luxuriant the foliage and
lovely the blossom, that there is somewhere in the tree a principle of evil. Buchanan, no
worshipper of the kings, or flatterer of princes, has taxed the powers of his pen to the
uttermost to paint in brilliant colours the character of David. "Although his whole
live," says the historian, "was exemplary beyond anything which history records;
yet for a few years before his death, he devoted himself so entirely to preparations for
another and a better world, that he greatly increased the veneration which his earlier
years had inspired. As he equalled the most excellent of the former kings in his warlike
achievements, and excelled them in his cultivation of the parts of peace, at last, as if
he had ceased to contend with others for pre-eminence in virtue he endeavoured to rival
himself, and in this he so succeeded, that the utmost ingenuity of the most learned who
should attempt to delineate the resemblance of a good king, would not be able to conceive
one so excellent as David during his whole life evinced himself."2
This is just what we would have expected Buchanan to say, had he said it when David was
but newly dead; but the wonder is that this eulogium was written when the king had been
four hundred years in the grave, and when the true character of David’s policy had
proclaimed itself in the ruin of the letters, of the arts, and of the religion of his
native land! Had the historian come to love a system which dragged martyrs to the stake,
and chased himself into exile when he penned this panegyric on the prince who of all who
ever reigned in Scotland had distinguished himself by his zeal to have that system set up
in the land. Or did the historian’s insight and sound judgment forsake him in this
instance, and failing to distinguish a wise from a destructive policy, did he award praise
where he ought to have pronounced censure, if not condemnation? We can excuse him only by
saying that in viewing the character of David he adopted a wrong stand point. He looked at
the virtues which diffused happiness within the narrow circle of his court, and during the
brief span of his lifetime only, and abstracted his view from the evils of his policy
which spread desolation over the wider area of his realm, and prolonged their pernicious
action for the space of four centuries. Seen from the one point of view King David’s
character reveals itself in brilliance, seen from the other it receded into blackness. The
historian, however, is responsible for the stand-point he adopts; it is one of the main
elements of justice and truth.
In politics, as in religion, we must walk by
"faith" and not by "sight." Vices which are "seen" are by
that very circumstance deprived of half of their evil. It is the vices that are not
seen, or that present themselves in the guise of virtues that accomplish the greatest
mischief. Nations have been destroyed, and the world’s happiness has been blighted,
not so much by vicious characters as by false principles. All history is
full of examples of this truth, some of them, on a colossal scale. Monsters like Nero and
Caligula have not been the greatest scourges of mankind. The abhorrence awakened by their
wickedness has set bounds to its destructive influence. Their crimes are reprobated rather
than imitated. Not so the inventors or propagators of a false principle. It is they who
have been the greatest desolators of the world. Such principle once enthroned in the
world’s belief, before it can be overthrown must first demonstrate its own falsity;
ages may be necessary to enable it to do this; meanwhile, it is dominating mankind, and
working its slow but terrible ruin in silence.
As a man David must be judged by his personal
accomplishments and qualities; as a king—and it is as a king that the Scots have to
do with him—he must be tried by the air and scope of his policy. There can be no
difficulty in applying that standard, and measuring thereby the obligations which
posterity owes to his labours, and the reverence in which it ought to hold his memory. If
his policy was enlightened and beneficent we shall have only to look around and witness
the monument of it in a great and prosperous country; but if evil we shall in like manner
read the tokens of it in a land weighed down under a load of woes. What say the four
centuries that come after David? They rise up in the judgment against him. This is a
witness that cannot lie. We are confronted with an array of facts which it is dismal to
recall or to recite; the children of the soil sold to strangers, the acres of the country
parted among proud Normans and greedy priests, the churches of the Culdees in ruins; the
reverent services of the sanctuary converted into pantomime, the flocks fed with ribald
jests and silly tales; all the springs of the nation’s well-being dried up, and above
the ruin which Scotland comes in a few centuries to present sits enthroned a great red
Moloch which demands to be worshipped with sacrifices of blood.
It has been pleaded in David’s behalf
that he was educated in England, that the native church of his country, the Columban, had
grievously degenerated, and that he was sincere in the change he introduced in the
religion of his kingdom. But all this goes a very little way to excuse him, as most
assuredly it had not the slightest effect in mitigating the evils to which his policy gave
birth. Sincerity to be of any value must be founded on rational conviction, and rational
conviction, David had none. He came from England with the fore-gone conclusion that the
Romish was the better religion, and must be set up in Scotland. David had evidence within
his reach which would have enabled him to arrive at a sound conclusion on this point had
he chosen to avail himself of it. He knew3 that this new form of worship was distasteful
to the great body of the Scots; he knew that for centuries they had resisted its
introduction and withstood conversion to it; he knew that former kings who had essayed on
a small scale what he was not purposing to do on a large, had had to employ intrigue and
violence; he knew that the scheme he contemplated would cross the most venerated
traditions of the Scots, and desecrate their most cherished memories, and dry up the
deepest springs of their power. As one who was to reign over a people who had once been
enlightened and great, and had left their record as such in history of nations, he was
bound to have weighed all these considerations. He could not forecast the future and
foresee all the ruin that was to follow his policy; but the past was open to his scrutiny,
he was bound to hear what it had to say, and had he listened to it would have warned him
to shun the path on which he was now entering, as one that might lead to the fall of his
house, and would most surely entail calamity upon the nation.
This, at least, David might have known, that,
in his ecclesiastical polity, he reversed all the maxims of equity and honour which had
guided him in his civil administration. He had fought for the ancient honour of Scotland
against the mail-clad warriors of England, but he weakly betrayed it to the men in frocks
and cowls from abroad. He had combatted for his English principalities and earldoms; not a
footbreadth of territory would he surrender to Stephen, but he ruthlessly stript the
Culdees of lands and heritages which they held by tenures more ancient and more sacred
than his own, and therewith he enriched foreign priors and abbots. He adjudicated with
scrupulous fairness betwixt man and man, but he did not hold scales of justice equally
even betwixt the ancient Scottish church and the new intruder, the Roman. This was not the
part either of a good knight or of a patriotic king. Nor must the fact be overlooked, for
we see in it retribution, and we learn from it instruction, that the same man who drew
upon Scotland this inundation of English clerics, drew upon it the inundation of English
armies. It is to King David that the Scots owe their wars with the English. His
ill-advised attempt to place his niece Maud on the throne of England, and to restore the
Anglo-Saxon family to the government of that realm, awakened the resentment of Stephen,
and provoked those aggressions upon the independence of Scotland, which, continuing under
the two Edwards, resulted in two centuries of humiliation and calamities to the Scottish
nation. It was a farther evil consequence of David’s policy that it broke the unity
of the nation so that Scotland could no longer bring its whole heart into the struggle, as
it has done in its conflict with the Dane. Every Norman monk whom David had planted in the
kingdom, in his heart wished success to the English arms. It was the interest of these
foreign ecclesiastics that there should be but one kingdom, and that it should be under
the Norman sceptre, and so an effectual guarantee obtained that the old Culdeeism should
never more lift up its head, or dispute possession of the country with the new churches
which David had planted in the land. All this was well known to the English monarchs, and
thence the persistency of their attempts to crush the independence of the northern
kingdom. If the consciousness of this emboldened the English sovereigns, it in an equal
degree dispirited the Scots. The treachery to country which crept in with the foreign
friars spread like a poison through the nation, and did its work in paralyzing the heart
of Scottish patriotism and enfeebling the arm of Scottish valour. In the great conflict
that soon thereafter opened, noble after noble gave way, battle after battle was lost, and
England was on the very point of triumphing, not over Scotland only, but over herself as
well. The same blow that would have struck down Scotland would have struck off one of the
main arms of England’s strength, and sorely crippled her in the conflicts that lay
before her. A staunch ally would in the future have been missing from her side in many a
battle by sea and by land; and what would have been more to be deplored, England, in her
greater enterprise of subjugating the world by the arts of peace would have been without
her most zealous and efficient fellow-labourer. It had almost come to be so. The policy of
David had inflicted a deadly blight on Scottish patriotism, and it lay benumbed for two
centuries. During the currency of these dreary years the throne was filled by weak
sovereigns, and the English were busy plotting to put chains upon the limbs of the
Scottish nation. The patriotic spirit that slumbered but was not dead awoke amid the
carnage of the battle-fields of Wallace and Bruce. The greater struggle for liberty,
political and spiritual, which Bannockburn inaugurated, was prolonged for two hundred
years. To chronicle the triumphs and defeats which marked the course of the momentous
struggle; to paint the shining virtues of the patriot, the heroic deeds of the warrior,
and the sublime triumphs of the martyr which shed upon it so resplendent a lustre; to
describe the combat lighted up this hour with the glory of magnanimity and self devotion,
and darkened the next by the blackness of perfidy and cowardice; to exhibit the alternate
hopes and fears which agitated the bosoms of the combatants, and above all portray the
great principles which underlay the conflict, and which expanded the intellect and
sustained the soul of those who were engaged in it, and impelled them to fight on till
their great task was accomplished, and Scotland stood erect in a perfect liberty, prepared
to take her place by the side of her sister of England as her meet yoke-fellow in the
sublime mission of extending to the nations of the world, that liberty which they had
vindicated for themselves, will be our business in the subsequent volumes of this history
FOOTNOTES
1. Buchanan, Hist. Scot., lib. vii., c. 36.
2. Buchanan, Hist. Scot., lib. vii. c. 36. |
