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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets," Mrs. Oliphant embarks on a literary journey through the storied past of Edinburgh, intertwining its rich historical narrative with vibrant portraits of its prominent figures. Written in a style that harmonizes personal reflection with rigorous historical analysis, this work resonates with the Romantic era's fascination for heritage and individualism. Oliphant explores the impact of saints, kings, and poets, elucidating their profound influences on the city's cultural tapestry, while employing a lyrical narrative that captures the spirit of 19th-century Scotland's intellectual revival. Mrs. Oliphant, an accomplished novelist and biographer, draws upon her extensive experience living in Edinburgh to infuse her work with authenticity and depth. Her background reflects her commitment to chronicling the histories of unsung heroes and overlooked narratives; her literary endeavors often spotlight women's voices and local history, merging them with broader cultural themes. Oliphant's keen observations and passionate prose reveal her profound appreciation for Edinburgh's complex legacy, as well as her desire to preserve its stories for future generations. This book is highly recommended for readers interested in the intersection of history, literature, and place. Whether you are an aficionado of Scottish heritage or a newcomer to the illustrious tales of Edinburgh, Oliphant's engaging writing will enrich your understanding of this iconic city. "Royal Edinburgh" serves as an invitation to explore the legacies of Scotland's luminaries, making it a must-read for both historians and literary devotees. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets
Table of Contents
Introduction
A city’s character is revealed most clearly in the lives of those who prayed, ruled, thundered, and sang within its walls. This book approaches Edinburgh not as a map of streets and stones but as a living inheritance shaped by belief, power, conscience, and imagination. It proposes that a city’s moral weather can be read in the stories of its spiritual exemplars, its sovereigns and statesmen, its reforming voices, and its artists. In tracing those interwoven currents, it invites readers to watch a capital become a symbol, its identity forged where private devotion meets public duty and eloquence transforms into enduring memory.
Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets by Mrs. Oliphant (Margaret Oliphant) is a work of narrative history and cultural portraiture that centers Edinburgh across successive ages. First published in the late nineteenth century, it reflects a Victorian sensibility attentive to both moral judgment and the texture of place. Rather than a conventional chronicle, the book assembles a composite image of the city by organizing its past around emblematic figures and roles. The result is a guided encounter with Edinburgh’s religious traditions, royal pageantries, reforming energies, and literary achievements, presented in prose that balances clarity with the dignity befitting its storied subject.
The premise is simple and generous: follow the city through those who gave it a voice, a conscience, and a crown. Mrs. Oliphant proceeds by linking epochs to the people who defined them—saints whose piety left civic marks, monarchs whose decisions altered streets and institutions, preachers whose words rearranged loyalties, and poets whose lines fixed landscapes in cultural memory. Readers can expect a clear, steady narrative that favors evocative scene-setting over technical detail. The mood is reflective rather than polemical, and the voice is that of an experienced observer who respects tradition while inviting readers to notice how tradition was made.
Several themes anchor the work’s appeal. Foremost is the interplay of faith and governance: how devotion can inspire policy, and how authority tries to embody virtue. Closely allied is the power of rhetoric—prophetic and poetic—to mobilize communities and shape the city’s self-understanding. The book also treats Edinburgh as a palimpsest, where each layer of memory overlays but does not erase what came before. Monuments, courts, kirks, and closes appear as stages on which recurring dramas of conscience and ambition unfold. Across these pages, civic identity emerges not as a settled inheritance but as a conversation between past convictions and present needs.
Mrs. Oliphant’s method blends panoramic survey with intimate character sketch. She moves with ease from broad transitions in public life to the personal temperaments that precipitate them, attentive to the ways temperament and circumstance meet. The narrative pauses where the moral stakes are high, weighing action against consequence without losing momentum. Her style is measured, lucid, and hospitable to general readers, offering enough context to situate events while trusting readers to feel the gravitational pull of great personalities. The experience is less archival than atmospheric: a cultivated walk through a city that reveals different aspects of itself as one crosses from hill to valley, court to sanctuary.
For contemporary readers, the book invites reflection on how places are made meaningful. It asks what binds a community when creeds shift, institutions reform, and new art vies with old loyalties. It shows literature as a public force, faith as a civic architect, and political authority as a moral experiment whose outcomes shape daily life. Coming from a nineteenth-century author who wrote widely across history and fiction, it also models how narrative can connect cultural memory to lived space. In an age still wrestling with heritage and change, its questions about continuity, responsibility, and public imagination remain resonant.
Approached today, Royal Edinburgh offers the satisfactions of a guided ramble that is also a meditation. It orients newcomers to the city’s emblematic figures and frames, while giving seasoned admirers a fresh way to join disparate epochs into a coherent vista. Without exhaustive minutiae or academic apparatus, it summons the atmosphere in which decisions were argued, prayers offered, and verses minted. Readers will come away with a sharpened sense of what is at stake when a city becomes a symbol, and why Edinburgh’s saints, kings, prophets, and poets still shadow its streets with meanings that invite discovery.
Synopsis
Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets presents a historical portrait of Edinburgh through the people and institutions that shaped it. Beginning with the city’s striking topography—Castle Rock, the ridge of the High Street, the Canongate descending to Holyrood, and the looming presence of Arthur’s Seat—the book situates readers within the physical setting that guided royal, religious, and civic life. It outlines a method that follows four strands—sanctity, sovereignty, prophecy, and poetry—showing how they converge in public spaces, churches, palaces, and courts. Drawing from chronicles, traditions, and surviving buildings, the narrative surveys Edinburgh’s evolution from fortress-burg to national capital.
The account opens with the early ecclesiastical foundations that anchor the city’s identity. It highlights the cult of St. Cuthbert on the city’s western flank and the enduring witness of St. Margaret, whose chapel crowns the Castle and whose piety influenced courtly and civic reform. Under David I, Holyrood Abbey was founded at the foot of the hill, forming a sacred counterpart to the royal stronghold above. These sites fostered a rhythm of worship and rule that attracted craftsmen, merchants, and scholars, planting the conditions for a thriving burgh. Edinburgh’s earliest growth is thus framed by religious devotion intertwined with strategic power.
With sanctity established, the narrative turns to the medieval monarchy that consolidated Edinburgh’s political importance. The Castle became a principal seat, while Holyrood evolved into a setting for ceremony and administration. The Stewart dynasty anchors these chapters, culminating in the flourishing court of James IV, noted for chivalric display, learning, and cultural exchange. The catastrophe of Flodden in 1513 abruptly closes this phase, reshaping policy and memory. Through accession, minority, and regency, Edinburgh navigates the complexities of royal succession and foreign alliance. The city’s civic institutions, guilds, and legal traditions expand in parallel, preparing the ground for later religious and political change.
Mary, Queen of Scots, brings courtly refinement and conflict into sharp focus. The book traces her residence at Holyrood, the interactions of court and Kirk, and the pressures of faction and policy that marked her reign without dwelling on intimate detail. Attention then shifts to James VI, whose education in a reformed Scotland and skill in statecraft culminate in the Union of the Crowns in 1603. His departure for London changes Edinburgh’s status, moving the royal court south while leaving legal, academic, and ecclesiastical leadership in the city. The shift sets conditions for new tensions between royal authority and local religious governance.
The Reformation and its leaders—portrayed as Edinburgh’s “prophets”—shape the next sections. John Knox’s ministry at St. Giles, sermons in the High Kirk, and interventions in civic affairs illustrate the Kirk’s formative influence. The narrative outlines iconoclasm, reorganization of parish life, and the stringent moral discipline administered through sessions and presbyteries. It introduces figures who consolidated reformed structures, balancing doctrinal aims with the city’s legal and mercantile needs. Holyrood’s monastic past gives way to new uses, while the Castle retains strategic function. This period underscores how preaching, governance, and education redirected public life, producing durable institutions and habits of civic participation.
Seventeenth-century upheavals situate Edinburgh at the center of national conflict. The signing of the National Covenant in 1638, meetings in St. Giles and Greyfriars, and the Bishops’ Wars bring mass mobilization and negotiation to the city’s streets and kirks. Civil war, the campaigns of Montrose, and Cromwellian occupation follow, each leaving administrative and architectural traces. Restoration politics, church settlements, and the later “Killing Times” define relations between conscience and crown. The Revolution of 1688–89 and the reformed settlement recalibrate authority. Finally, the 1707 Union is presented as an institutional turning point staged in Parliament House, provoking unrest while setting a new constitutional landscape.
The eighteenth century introduces transformation in society, culture, and urban design. Edinburgh’s Enlightenment emerges through philosophers, historians, and physicians—Hume, Smith, Robertson, and their circles—whose work radiates from the university, courts, and clubs. Civic improvement follows: the North Bridge, the draining of the Nor’ Loch, and James Craig’s New Town plan create a modern counterpart to the Old Town’s closes and wynds. The book describes the contrast and traffic between these districts—legal and academic life concentrated near the Lawnmarket and Parliament House, polite society expanding along George Street and Princes Street. Publishing, science, and medicine institutionalize the city’s intellectual reputation.
Poets and men of letters consolidate Edinburgh’s cultural identity. Allan Ramsay’s vernacular revival, the career of Robert Fergusson, and Robert Burns’s celebrated visit connect street life, print, and performance. Periodicals and publishing houses, including influential magazines, knit writers and readers into a shared public sphere. Walter Scott’s work receives particular emphasis: his historical imagination recasts the city’s past in popular form and organizes the royal visit of 1822, which entwines pageantry with tradition. Monuments and commemorations signal the rise of a civic pantheon. Through these figures, the city’s image becomes exportable, balancing scholarly rigor with romantic appeal.
The concluding chapters track nineteenth-century consolidation: railways, Princes Street Gardens, and public monuments reshape the cityscape; museums, libraries, and schools broaden civic access to knowledge. Royal connections, renewed through ceremonial visits, underscore continuity with earlier courts while acknowledging constitutional change. The book closes by integrating its four threads—saints, kings, prophets, and poets—into a single urban narrative. Edinburgh’s character emerges as a fusion of piety, sovereignty, moral seriousness, and imaginative expression, embedded in its stones and institutions. Presenting episodes in sequence, the work emphasizes how places and people together formed a capital whose civic memory continues to organize its present.
Historical Context
Mrs. Oliphant’s Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets surveys the city’s history from its medieval emergence around the Castle rock to the late nineteenth century. Written and published in the Victorian era (c. 1890), it looks backward from a period of imperial confidence and urban renewal to the Old Town’s storied closes, St Giles’ High Kirk, Holyrood Abbey and Palace, and the ridge of the Royal Mile. Edinburgh is treated as a palimpsest where ecclesiastical power, royal ceremony, civil government, and literary culture intersect. Oliphant’s vantage point—after the Disruption of 1843 and amid New Town respectability—lets her measure earlier religious and political convulsions against the city’s modern civic identity.
The city’s medieval foundations center on royal and sacred institutions. Queen Margaret (c. 1045–1093), canonized in 1250, fostered ecclesiastical reform and is commemorated by St Margaret’s Chapel within Edinburgh Castle. Her son, David I (r. 1124–1153), established burghs, founded Holyrood Abbey in 1128, and advanced the feudal and monastic order that anchored the capital’s growth. St Giles’ origins lie in the twelfth century, later becoming the High Kirk. After Flodden (1513), where James IV fell, Edinburgh hastily raised the Flodden Wall (1513–1514). Oliphant links these saints and kings to the city’s topography, presenting Holyrood and the Castle as twin poles from which Edinburgh’s sacred monarchy and urban authority radiated.
Mary, Queen of Scots, made Edinburgh the stage of dynastic drama. Returning to Leith on 19 August 1561, she navigated a fractious Protestant capital. The murder of her secretary, David Rizzio, in Holyrood Palace on 9 March 1566, the birth of James (VI and I) in Edinburgh Castle on 19 June 1566, and the assassination of Henry Darnley at Kirk o’ Field on 10 February 1567 precipitated Mary’s downfall. Her abdication (1567) and the Lang Siege (1571–1573) ended with Edinburgh Castle’s capitulation to English artillery. Oliphant treats Mary’s Edinburgh as a crucible of courtly ritual and public uproar, balancing sympathy for the queen with attention to civic and ecclesiastical pressures.
The Scottish Reformation crystallized in 1559–1560, when Protestant lords and preachers, led intellectually by John Knox (c. 1514–1572), asserted a reformed confession. The Parliament of August 1560 abolished papal jurisdiction and approved the Scots Confession; Knox soon ministered at St Giles, advocating the First Book of Discipline’s parish, school, and poor-relief program. Kirk Sessions imposed moral oversight that reshaped urban life. Edinburgh’s burgh council, guilds, and congregations became engines of Reformation polity. Oliphant’s “prophets” foreground Knox as a civic pastor whose pulpit in the High Kirk redirected the city’s energies, presenting the Reformation as both theological revolution and social reordering enacted in Edinburgh’s streets and chambers.
Covenanting and civil-war crises followed. The imposition of the Laudian prayer book provoked the St Giles riot on 23 July 1637—traditionally linked to Jenny Geddes—prefiguring the National Covenant signed at Greyfriars Kirk on 28 February 1638. The Bishops’ Wars (1639–1640) established Presbyterian ascendancy, later formalized in the Solemn League and Covenant (1643). Cromwell’s invasion culminated in the defeat of Scottish forces at Dunbar (3 September 1650) and an English occupation that fortified Leith. Oliphant traces Edinburgh’s role as a covenanting capital, attentive to martyr-memory, session discipline, and the city’s oscillation between zeal and exhaustion, using Greyfriars and St Giles as symbolic precincts of popular sovereignty before the pulpit.
Union and Jacobitism reshaped sovereignty and sentiment. Negotiated in Parliament House, the Acts of Union (1707) dissolved the Scottish Parliament; riots in Edinburgh in 1706–1707 registered popular hostility. The Jacobite rising of 1745 brought Prince Charles Edward Stuart into Edinburgh on 17 September; following the victory at Prestonpans (21 September), he held court at Holyroodhouse until 31 October before marching south. After Culloden (16 April 1746), repression dismantled Highland military power. Oliphant uses Holyrood’s ballrooms and the Castle’s aloof guns to dramatize how dynastic nostalgia collided with burgh pragmatism, reading the ’45 as Edinburgh’s last pageant of royal romance amid an advancing era of commercial and professional governance.
The Scottish Enlightenment and the New Town recast Edinburgh’s identity. James Craig’s 1767 plan, the North Bridge (opened 1772), and squares like St Andrew and Charlotte (designed by Robert Adam) created a rational, airy quarter contrasted with the Old Town’s wynds. Intellectual life flourished through the University, the Advocates Library, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1783), while poets Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns, and Sir Walter Scott intertwined literature with civic pride. The Disruption of 1843, led by Thomas Chalmers, added a new ecclesiastical geography. Oliphant frames these poets and preachers as heirs to earlier saints and prophets, showing how Edinburgh’s moral and aesthetic leadership supplanted its royal centrality.
As social and political critique, the book juxtaposes courtly spectacle with burgh responsibility, exposing the volatility of power concentrated in palace, pulpit, and parliament. By tracing Mary’s vulnerability, the coercive reach of kirk discipline, and covenanting militancy, it interrogates gendered authority, sectarian intolerance, and the hazards of confessional absolutism. The ’45 illuminates the tension between popular loyalty and elite calculation, while the Union and New Town reveal how commerce and professionalism eclipse older forms of sovereignty yet leave Old Town poverty starkly visible. Oliphant thus critiques oligarchic burgh politics, urban inequality, and ecclesiastical overreach, proposing a civic ethic grounded in memory, education, and measured constitutionalism.
Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets
CHAPTER IJAMES I. POET AND LEGISLATOR
The growth of Edinburgh is difficult to trace through the mists and the tumults of the ages.[1q] The perpetual fighting which envelops the Scotland of those days as in the "great stour" or dust, which was Sir Walter Scott's conception of a battle, with gleams of swords and flashes of fire breaking through, offers few breaks through which we can see anything like the tranquil growth of that civic life which requires something of a steady and settled order and authority to give it being. The revolutions which took place in the country brought perpetual vicissitude to the Castle of Edinburgh, and no doubt destroyed and drove from their nests upon the eastern slopes of the rock the settlers who again and again essayed to keep their footing there. When the family of St. Margaret came to a conclusion, and the great historical struggle which succeeded ended in the establishment of Robert Bruce[1] upon the throne, that great victor and statesman destroyed the Castle of Edinburgh with other strongholds, that it might not afford a point of vantage to the English invader or other enemies of the country's peace—a step which would seem to have been premature, though probably, in the great triumph and ascendency in Scotland which his noble character and work had gained, he might have hoped that at least the unanimity of the nation and its internal peace were secured, and that only an enemy would attempt to dominate the reconciled and united country. The Castle was, however, built up again and again, re-established and destroyed, a centre of endless fighting during the tumultuous reigns that followed, though it is only on the accession of a new race, a family so deeply connected with the modern history of Great Britain that no reader can be indifferent to its early appearances, that Edinburgh begins to become visible as the centre of government, the royal residence from whence laws were issued, and where the business of the nation was carried on. Following what seems to be one of the most wonderful rules of heredity—a peculiarity considerably opposed to the views which have been recently current on that subject—Robert Bruce was too great a man to have a son worthy of him: and after the trifling and treacherous David the inheritance of his kingdom came through his daughter to a family already holding a high place—the Stewards of Scotland, great hereditary officials, though scarcely so distinguished in character as in position. The tradition that their ancestor Banquo[2] was the companion of Macbeth when the prophecy was made to him which had so great an effect upon that chieftain's career, and that to Banquo's descendants was adjudged the crown which Macbeth had no child to inherit, is far better known, thanks to Shakspeare, than any fact of their early history. It is probably another instance of that inventive ingenuity of the original chroniclers, which so cleverly imagined a whole line of fabulous kings, to give dignity and importance to the "ancient kingdom" thus carried back to inarticulate prehistoric ages. In this way the Stewarts, actually a branch of a well-known Norman family, were linked to a poetic and visionary past by their supposed identification with the children of Banquo, with all the circumstantial details of an elaborate pedigree. According to the legend, the dignity of Grand Steward of Scotland was conferred by Malcolm Canmore upon a descendant of the ancient thane, and the lineage of the family is traced through all the dim intervening ages with scrupulous minuteness. The title of Steward of Scotland was enough, it would seem, to make other lordships unnecessary, and gradually developed into that family surname with which we are now so familiar, which has wrought both Scotland and England so much woe, yet added so intense an interest to many chapters of national history. The early Stewards are present by name in all the great national events: but have left little characteristic trace upon the records, as of remarkable individuals. They took the cross in repeated crusades, carrying their official coat with its chequers, the brand of the Chief Servitor of the Scottish Court, through the wars of the Holy Land, till they came finally into the highest favour and splendour in the days of Bruce, whose cause, which was also the cause of the independence of Scotland, they maintained. Walter, who then held the office of Steward, was knighted on the field of Bannockburn. He was afterwards, as the story goes, sent to receive on the Border, after peace had been made, various prisoners who had been detained in England during the war, and among them Marjory Bruce, the daughter of the patriot-king. It would be easy to imagine the romance that followed: the young knight reverently escorting the young princess across the devastated country, which had not yet had time to recover its cruel wounds, but yet was all astir with satisfaction and hope: and how his account of what had happened in Scotland, and, above all, of that memorable field where he had won from the Bruce's own famous sword the touch of knighthood, would stir the maiden's heart. A brave young soldier with great hereditary possessions, and holding so illustrious an office, there was no reason why he should despair, however high-placed his affections might be. It takes a little from the romance to be obliged to acknowledge that he was already a widower; but marriages were early and oft-repeated in those days, and when Marjory Bruce died her husband was still only about twenty-three. It was thus that the crown came to the family of the Stewards of Scotland, the Stewarts of modern times: coming with a "lass" as her descendant said long afterwards, and likely to "go with a lass" when it was left to the infant Mary: though this last, with all her misfortunes, was the instrument not of destruction but transformation, and transferred that crown to a more splendid and enlarged dominion.
It was in the reign of Marjory's son, the grandson and namesake of the Bruce, and of his successors, that Edinburgh began to be of importance in the country, slowly becoming visible by means of charters and privileges, and soon by records of Parliaments, laws made, and public acts proceeding from the growing city. Robert Bruce, though he had destroyed the castle, granted certain liberties and aids to the burghers, both in repression and in favour pursuing the same idea, with an evident desire to substitute the peaceful progress of the town for the dangerous domination of the fortress. Between that period and the reign of the second Stewart, King Robert III, the castle had already been re-erected and re-destroyed more than once. Its occupation by the English seemed the chief thing dreaded by the Scots, and it was again and again by English hands that the fortifications were restored—such a stronghold and point of defence being evidently of the first importance to invaders, while much less valuable as a means of defence. In the year 1385 the walls must have encircled a large area upon the summit of the rock, the enceinte probably widening, as the arts of architecture and fortification progressed, from the strong and grim eyrie on the edge of the precipice to the wide and noble enclosure, with room for a palace as well as a fortress, into which the great castles of England were growing. The last erection of these often-cast-down walls was made by Edward III on his raid into Scotland, and probably the royal founder of Windsor Castle had given to the enclosure an amplitude unknown before. The Scots king most likely had neither the money nor the habits which made a great royal residence desirable, especially in a spot so easily isolated and so open to attack; but he gave a charter to his burghers of Edinburgh authorising them to build houses within the castle walls, and to pass in and out freely without toll or due—a curious privilege, which must have made the castle a sort of imperium in imperio, a town within a town. The little closets of rooms which in a much later and more luxurious age must have sufficed for the royal personages whom fate drove into Edinburgh Castle as a residence, are enough to show how limited were the requirements in point of space of the royal Scots. The room in which James VI of Scotland was born would scarcely be occupied, save under protest, by a housemaid in our days. But indeed the Castle of Edinburgh was neither adapted nor intended for a royal residence. The abbey in the valley, from which the King could retire on receipt of evil tidings, where the winds were hushed and the air less keen, and gardens and pleasant hillsides accessible, and all the splendour of religious ceremonies within reach, afforded more fit and secure surroundings even for a primitive court. The Parliament met, however, within the fortress, and the courts of justice would seem to have been held within reach of its shelter. And thither the burghers carried their wealth, and built among the remains of the low huts of an earlier age their straight steep houses, with high pitched roofs tiled with slabs of stone, rising gray and strong within the enceinte, almost as strong and apt to resist whatever missiles were possible as the walls themselves, standing out with straight defiant gables against the northern blue.
King Robert III was a feeble, sickly, and poor-spirited king, and he had a prodigal son of that gay, brilliant, attractive, and impracticable kind which is so well known in fiction and romance, and, alas! also so familiar in common life. David, Duke of Rothesay[3], was the first in the Scotch records who was ever raised to that rank—nothing above the degree of Earl having been known in the north before the son and brother of the King, the latter by the fatal title of Albany, brought a new degree into the roll of nobility. Young David, all unknowing of the tragic fate before him, was then a daring and reckless youth, held within bounds, as would appear, by the influence of a good and wise mother, and if an anxiety and trouble, at least as yet no disgrace to the throne. He was the contemporary of another madcap prince, far better known to us, of whose pranks we are all more than indulgent, and whose name has the attraction of youth and wit and freedom and boundless humour to the reader still. David of Scotland has had no one to celebrate his youthful adventures like him whose large and splendid touch has made Prince Hal[1] so fine a representative of all that is careless and gay in prodigal youth, with its noble qualities but half in abeyance, and abounding spirit and humour and reckless fancy making its course of wild adventure comprehensible even to the gravest. Perhaps the licence of the Stewart blood carried the hapless northern prince into more dangerous adventures than the wild fun of Gadshill and Eastcheap. And Prince David's future had already been compromised by certain sordid treacheries about his marriage when he first appears in history, without the force of character which changed Prince Hal into a conquering leader and strong sovereign, but with all the chivalrous instincts of a young knight. He had been appointed at a very early age Lieutenant of the Kingdom to replace his father, it being "well seen and kenned that our lorde the Kyng for sickness of his person may not travail to govern the realm," with full provision of counsellors for his help and guidance; which argues a certain confidence in his powers. But the cares of internal government were at this point interrupted by the more urgent necessity of repelling an invasion, a danger not unusual, yet naturally of an exciting kind.
On this occasion the invader was Henry IV of England, the father of the other prodigal, whose object is somewhat perplexing, and differs much from the usual raid to which the Scots were so well accustomed. So far as appears from all the authorities, his invasion was a sort of promenade of defiance or bravado, though it seems unlike the character of that astute prince to have undertaken so gratuitous a demonstration. He penetrated as far as Leith, and lay there for some time threatening, or appearing to threaten, Edinburgh Castle; but all that he seems to have done was to make proclamation by his knights and heralds in every town they passed through, of the old, always renewed, claim of allegiance to the English crown which every generation of Scots had so strenuously and passionately resisted. The fact that he was allowed to penetrate so far unmolested is as remarkable as that the invasion was an entirely peaceful one and harmed nobody. When Henry pitched his camp at Leith, Albany was within reach with what is called a great army, but did not advance a step to meet the invader—in face of whom, however, young David of Rothesay, and with him many potent personages, retired into Edinburgh Castle with every appearance of expecting a siege there. But when no sign of any such intention appeared or warlike movement of any kind, nothing but the gleam of Henry's spears, stationary day by day in the same place, and a strange tranquillity, which must have encouraged every kind of wondering rumour and alarm, the young Prince launched forth a challenge to the English king and host to meet him in person with two or three hundred knights on each side, and so to settle the question between them and save the spilling of Christian blood. Henry, it is said, replied with something of the sarcasm of a grave and middle-aged man to the hasty youth, regretting that Prince David should consider noble blood as less than Christian since he desired the effusion of one and not the other. The position of the young man shut up within the walls of the fortress in enforced inactivity while the hated Leopards of England fluttered in the fresh breezes from the Firth, and Henry's multitudinous tents shone in the northern sun—an army too great to be encountered by his garrison and noble attendants alone—while dark treason and evil intent in the person of Albany kept the army of Scotland inactive though within reach, was one to justify any such outbreak of impatience. David must have felt that should the invader press, there was little help to be expected from his uncle, and that he and his faction would look on not without pleasure to see the castle fall and the heir of Scotland taken or slain. But King Henry's object or meaning is more difficult to divine. Save for his proclamations, and the quite futile summons to King Robert to do homage, he seems to have attempted nothing against the country through which he was thus permitted to march unmolested. The little party of knights with their attendant squires and heralds riding to every market-cross upon the way, proclaiming to the astonished burghers or angry village folk the invader's manifesto, scarcely staying long enough to hear the fierce murmurs that arose—a passing pageant, a momentary excitement and no more—was a sort of defiant embassage which might have pleased the fancy of a young adventurer, but scarcely of a king so wary and experienced; and his own stay in the midst of the startled country is still more inexplicable. When the monks of Holyrood sent a mission to him to beg his protection, lying undefended as they did in the plain, his answer to them was curiously apologetic. "Far be it from me," he said, "to be so inhuman as to harm any holy house, especially Holyrood in which my father found a safe refuge.... I am myself half Scotch by the blood of the Comyns," added the invader. The account which Boece gives of the expedition altogether is amusing, and strictly in accord with all that is said by other historians, though they may not take the same amiable view. I quote from the quaint translation of Bellenden.
"A schort time efter King Harry came in Scotland with an army. Howbeit he did small injury to the people thairof, for he desirit nowt but his banner to be erected on their walls. Alwayis he was ane plesand enneme, and did gret humaniteis to the people in all places of Scotland where he was lodgit. Finally he showed to the lords of Scotland that he come in their rialm more by counsel of his nobles than ony hatred that he bore to Scottes. Soon efter he returnit without any further injure in England."
It is very seldom that a Scotch historian is able to designate an English invader as "a pleasant enemy," and whether there was some scheme which came to nothing under this remarkable and harmless raid, or whether it was only the carrying out of Henry's own policy "to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels"
it is difficult to say. The nobles pent up in Edinburgh Castle with the hot-headed young Prince at their head did not know what to make of the pleasant enemy. The alarm he had caused, compelling their own withdrawal into the stronghold, wrath at the mere sight of him there in the heart of Scotland, the humiliating inaction in which they were kept by a foe which neither attacked nor withdrew, must have so chafed the Prince and his companions that the challenge thrown forth like a bugle from the heights to break this oppressive silence and bring about the lingering crisis one way or another must have been a relief to their excitement if nothing else. One of the bewildered reasons alleged for the invasion is that young David had written letters to France in which he called Bolingbroke a traitor—letters which had fallen into Henry's hands; but this is as unlikely to have brought about the invasion as any other frivolous cause, though no doubt it might make the young Prince still more eager to take upon himself the settling of the quarrel. We have no reason to suppose that any foreboding of his fate had crossed the mind of the youth at this period of his career, yet to watch the army of England lying below, and to know his uncle Albany close at hand, and to feel himself incapable—with nothing but a limited garrison at his command and no doubt the wise Douglas and the other great noblemen holding him back—of meeting the invader except by some such fantastic chivalrous expedient, must have been hard enough.
And how strange is the scene, little in accordance with the habits and traditions of either country: the English camp all quiet below, as if on a holiday expedition, the Scots looking on in uneasy expectation, not knowing what the next moment might bring. The excitement must have grown greater from day to day within and without, while all the inhabitants, both citizens and garrison, kept anxious watch to detect the first sign of the enemy's advance. Henry, we are told, was called away to oppose a rising in Wales; not indeed that rising which we all know so well in which Prince Hal, more fortunate than his brother prodigal, had the means of showing what was in him; but even the suggestion approaches once more strangely and suggestively the names of the two heirs whose fate was so different—the one almost within sight of a miserable ending, the other with glory and empire before him. Prince Henry did not apparently come with his father to Scotland, or there might perhaps have been a different ending to the tale, and it would not have needed Harry Hotspur to rouse his namesake from his folly. There was, alas! no such noble rival to excite David of Scotland to emulation, and no such happy turning-point before him. No one, not even a minstrel or romancer, has remembered it in his favour that he once defied the English host for the love of his country and the old never-abandoned cause of Scottish independence. Already it would seem a prodigal who was a Stewart had less chance than other men. Whether some feeble fibre in the race had already developed in this early representative of the name, or whether it was the persistent ill-fortune which has always pursued them, making life a continual struggle and death a violent ending, the fatal thread which has run through their history for so many generations comes here into the most tragic prominence, the beginning of a long series of tragedies. It adds a softening touch to the record of David's unhappy fate that the death of his mother is recorded as one of the great misfortunes of his life. In the same year in which these public incidents occurred the Queen died, carrying with her the chief influence which had restrained her unfortunate son. She was Annabella Drummond, a woman of character and note, much lamented by the people. And to add to this misfortune she was followed to the grave within a year by the great Earl of Angus, David's father-in-law, and the Bishop of St. Andrews, to whom, as the Primate of Scotland, the young Prince's early instruction had probably been committed, as his loss is noted along with the others as a special disaster.
Thus the rash and foolish youth was left to face the world and all its temptations with no longer any one whom he feared to grieve or whom he felt himself bound to obey. His father, a fretful invalid, had little claim upon his reverence, and his uncle Albany, the strong man of the family, was his most dangerous enemy, ever on the watch to clear out of his path those who stood between him and the throne: or such at least was the impression which he left upon the mind of his time. Thus deprived of all the guides who had power over him, and of the only parent whom he could respect, the young Duke of Rothesay, only twenty-three at most, plunged into all those indulgences which are so fatally easy to a prince. It is supposed that the marriage into which a false policy had driven him was not the marriage he desired. But this was a small particular in those days, as it has proved even in other times less rude. He ran into every kind of riot and dissipation, which the councillors appointed to aid him could not check. After no doubt many remonstrances and appeals this band of serious men relinquished the attempt, declaring themselves unable to persuade the Prince even to any regard for decency: and the ill-advised and feeble King committed to Albany, who had been standing by waiting for some such piece of good fortune, the reformation of his son. The catastrophe was not slow to follow. Rothesay was seized near St. Andrews on the pretence of stopping a mad enterprise in which he was engaged, and conveyed to Falkland, where he died in strict confinement, "of dysentery or others say of hunger" is the brief and terrible record—blaming no one—of the chroniclers, on Easter Eve 1401. It would be vain to attempt to add anything to the picture of the young unfortunate and his end which Sir Walter Scott has given. We can but rescue out of obscurity the brief moment in which that young life was at the turning-point and might have changed into something noble. Had his challenge been accepted, and had he died sword in hand outside the castle gates for Scotland and her independence, how touching and inspiring would have been the story! But fortune never favoured the Stewarts; they have had no luck, to use a more homely expression, such as falls to the lot of other races, and what might have been a legend of chivalry, the record of a young hero, drops to the horror of a miserable murder done upon a victim who foils even the pity he excites—a young debauchee almost as miserable and wretched as the means by which he died.
There was this relic of generosity and honour about the unfortunate Prince, even in his fallen state, that he refused to consent to the assassination of the uncle, who found no difficulty, it would appear, in assassinating him; thus showing that wayward strain of nobleness among many defects and miseries which through all their tragic career was to be found even in the least defensible of his race.
King Robert, who had for some time been retired from the troubles of the throne, a poor man, infirm in health and in purpose, virtually deposed in favour of the son who was Lieutenant or the brother who was Regent of the kingdom, and from whom all his domestic comfort had been taken as well as his power, was driven to desperation by this blow. He had lost his wife and his best counsellors; he had never been strong enough to restrain his son, nor resist his brother. David, his first-born and heir, the gay and handsome youth who was dazzling and delightful to his father's eyes even in his worst follies, had been, as no doubt he felt, delivered over to his worst enemy by that father's own tremulous hand; and the heart-broken old man in his bereavement and terror could only think of getting the one boy who remained to him safe and out of harm's way, perhaps with the feeling that Albany might once again persuade him to deliver over this last hope into his hands if he did not take a decisive step at once. The boy-prince was at St. Andrews, pursuing his studies, under the care of the bishop, when his brother was murdered; and from thence he was sent, when the preparations were complete, across the Firth to the Bass, there to await a ship which should take him to France. It was a forlorn beginning for the Prince of Scotland to be thus hastily taken from his books and the calm of a semi-monastic life and hurried off to that wild rock in the middle of the waves, probably with his brother's awful story thrilling in his ears and his terrible uncle within reach, pushing forward a mock inquiry in Parliament into the causes of Rothesay's death. How easy it would have been for that uncle with the supreme power in his hands to seize the boy who now stood alone between him and the throne; and with what burning at the heart, of impotent rage and fierce indignation, the little Prince, old enough to know and feel his father's helplessness, his own abandonment, and his brother's terrible end, must have been conveyed away to the sea stronghold among the bitter eastern blasts. James, the first of the name, was not one of the feeble ones of the family. With all the romance and poetry of his race he conjoined a great spirit and a noble intelligence, and even at twelve, in the precocious development of that age of blood, when even a royal stripling had to learn to defend himself and hold his own, he must have had some knowledge why it was that he had to be sent thus clandestinely out of his native country: he, the hope of Scotland, in terror for his life.
The little garrison on the rock and the governor to whom the Prince's safety was confided must have watched with many an anxious vigil among the trading vessels stumbling heavily down the Firth from Leith, for that sail which was to carry their charge, into safety as they thought. Whether there was any navy belonging to the Crown at this period, or whether the King himself possessed some galley that could venture on the voyage to France, we are not told. But no doubt the ship when it arrived bore some sign by which the Prince's guardians, and unfortunately others besides, could recognise it. It could not be in any way a cheerful embarkation. It was in the dark days of Lent, in March, when the north is most severe: and the grey skies and blighting wind would be appropriate to the feelings of the exiles as they put forth from their rock amid the wild beating of the surf, anxiously watched by the defenders of the place, who no doubt had at the same time to keep up a vigilant inspection landward, lest any band of spearmen from Albany should arrive upon the adjacent shore in time to stop the flight. The grey rock, the greyer leaden sea, the whirling flight of wild sea birds white against the dark horizon, the little boat, kept with difficulty from dashing against the cliffs and rocky boulders, the attendant ship, driven up and down by the waves, and distant Fife, with its low hills in tones of neutral tint upon the horizon—would all increase the sadness of the parting: but no doubt there was a long breath of relief breathed by everybody about when the vessel continued its course, and slowly disappeared down the Firth. Whatever might happen elsewhere, at least the heir was safe.
THE BASS ROCK
But this hope soon proved futile. Whether it was some traitorous indication from Albany[4], or information from another source, or pure hazard, which directed the English ships to this one vessel with its royal freight, it had but rounded the headland of Flamborough when it fell into the hands of the enemy. Palm Sunday 1405[5] was the date of this event, but it was not till the end of Lent 1423, almost exactly eighteen years after, that James came back. The calamity seemed overwhelming to the nation and to all who were not pledged to Albany throughout Scotland. It was the death-warrant of poor old King Robert in his retirement. He lingered out a weary year in sickness and sorrow, and when the anniversary of his son's loss came round again, died at Rothesay, in Bute, amid the lovely lakes and islets of western Scotland—a scene of natural peace and tranquillity, which, let us hope, shed some little balm upon the heart of the helpless superseded sovereign. Perhaps he loved the place because it had given his title to his murdered boy, the hapless David, so gallant and so gay. There is something more than ordinarily pathetic and touching in the misfortunes of the feeble in an age of iron.[2q] As civilisation advances they have means of protecting themselves, but not in a time which is all for the strongest. One son buried, like any peasant's son, ignobly in the Abbey of Lindores: the other in an English prison, at the mercy of the "auld enem[6]y," whom Scotland had again and again resisted to the death: and his kingdom entirely gone from him, in the hands of his arrogant and imperious brother; there was nothing left for poor King Robert but to die.
Thus James became at thirteen, and in an English castle, the King of Scotland. His prison, however, proved a noble school instead of an ignoble confinement to his fine and elevated spirit. The name of Stewart has never been so splendidly illustrated as by this patriotic and chivalrous Prince. No doubt it is infinitely to the credit of the English kings, both Henrys, IV and V, that he received from them all the advantages of education that could have been given to a prince of their own blood—advantages by which he profited nobly, acquiring every art and cultivation that belonged to his rank, besides that divine art which no education can communicate, and which is bestowed by what would seem a caprice, were it not divine, upon prince or ploughman as it pleases God. For above all his knightly and kingly qualities, his studies in chivalry and statesmanship, which prepared him to fill the throne of Scotland as no man save his great ancestor Bruce had yet filled it, James Stewart was a poet of no mean rank, not unworthy to be named even in the presence of Chaucer, and well worthy of the place which he has kept in literature. We need not enter here into that part of his history which concerns another locality full of great and princely associations—the noble Castle of Windsor, where the royal youth first saw and sang the lady of his love, "the fairest and the sweeteste yonge flour," of whom he has left one of the most tender and beautiful descriptions that is to be found in all the course of poetry. It is more to our present purpose to tell how, amid all the charms of that courtly residence, so far superior to anything which primitive Scotland could offer in the way of dignity or luxury, the boy-king remained faithful to his country, and maintained the independence for which she had so long struggled. It is said that the one advantage taken of his captivity and youth was to press the old oft-repeated arguments concerning the supposed supremacy of England, and the homage due from the kings of Scotland, upon the boy who bore that title sadly amid the luxury and splendour of what was still a prison, however gracious and kind his jailers might be. No circumstances could have been better suited to impress upon James's mind the conviction that submission was inevitable: and it would have been almost more than mortal virtue on the part of his captors had they not attempted to bring about so advantageous a conviction. King Henry V, under whom it is said the attempt was made, had been most generously liberal to and careful of the boy. He was a man so brilliant in reputation and success that a generous youth might well have been led by enthusiasm into any homage that was suggested, too happy to feel himself thus linked to so great a king; and James was very young, distant from his own country and all native advisers, his very life as well as his liberty in the power of those who asked this submission from him, and the force of circumstances so great that even his own people might have forgiven, and Holy Church could scarcely have hesitated to dispense him from keeping, an obligation entered into under such pressure. But the royal youth stood fast, and was not to be moved by any argument. Boece[7], whose authority is unfortunately not much to be depended upon, has a still more distinct and graphic story of judgment and firmness on the part of the young captive. He had been, according to this account, taken to France in the train of King Henry, who after the defeat the English had sustained near Orleans, chiefly through the valour of the Scots who had joined the French army, sent for James, and desired him "to pass to the Scots, and to command them to return to Scotland. King Harry promised, gif the said James brought this matter to good effect, not only to remit his ransom but to send him to Scotland with great riches and honour." James answered courteously, with expressions of goodwill and gratitude for the humanity shown towards him, but "I marvel not little," he said, "that thou considerest not how I have no power above the Scots so long as I am ane private man and holden in captivity." The chronicler adds: "Then said King Henry, 'Maist happy people shall they be that happens to get yon noble man to their prince.'" It is a pity that we have no more trustworthy proof of this charming story.
As a matter of fact James attained his freedom only after the death of Albany, when the resistance or the still more effectual indifference to his liberation of the man who alone could profit by his death in prison, or by any unpopular step he might be seduced into making to gain his freedom, was dead, and had ceased from troubling. It would perhaps, however, be false to say that his imprisonment had done him nothing but good. So far as education went this was no doubt the case; but it is possible that in his subsequent life his reforms were too rapid, too thorough-going, too modern, for Scotland. The English sovereigns were richer, stronger, and more potent; the English commonalty more perfectly developed, and more capable of affording a strong support to a monarch who stood against the nobles and their capricious tyranny. James might not have been the enlightened ruler he was but for his training in a region of more advanced and cultivated civilisation; but had he been less enlightened, more on the level of his subjects, he might have had a less terrible end and a longer career.
He returned to Scotland—with the bride of whom he had made so beautiful a picture, preserving her lovely looks and curious garments, and even the blaze of the Balas ruby on her white throat, to be a delight to all the after generations—in 1423, during Lent; and on Passion Sunday, which Boece calls Care Sunday, entered Edinburgh, where there was "a great confluence of people out of all parts of Scotland richt desirous to see him: for many of them," says the chronicle, "had never seen him before, or else at least the prent of his visage was out of their memory." There must indeed have been but few who could recognise the little prince who had been stolen away for safety at twelve in the accomplished man of thirty in all the fulness of his development, a bridegroom, and accustomed to the state and prestige of a richer Court than anything that Scotland could boast, who thus came among them full of the highest hopes and purposes, and surrounded by unusual splendour and wealth. It is true there was the burden behind him of a heavy ransom to pay, but her English kindred, we may well believe, did not suffer the Lady Jane to appear in her new kingdom without every accessory that became a queen; and a noble retinue of adventurous knights, eager to try their prowess against the countrymen of that great Douglas whose name was still so well known, would swell the train of native nobles who attended the sovereign. Old Edinburgh comes to light in the glow of this arrival, not indeed with any distinctness of vision, but with something of the aspect of a capital filled to overflowing with a many-coloured and picturesque crowd. The country folk in their homespun, and all the smaller rank of gentlemen, with their wives in the French hoods which fashion already dictated, thronged the ways and filled every window to see the King come in. It was more like the new setting up of a kingdom, and first invention of that dignity, than a mere return: and eager crowds came from every quarter to see the King, so long a mere name, now suddenly blazing into reality, with all the primitive meaning of the word so much greater and more living than anything that is understood in it now. The King's Grace! after the long sway of the Regent, always darkly feared and suspected, and the feeble deputyship full of abuses of his son Murdoch, it was like a new world to have the true Prince come back, the blood of Bruce, the genuine and native King, not to speak of the fair Princess by his side and the quickened life they brought with them. From the gates of the castle where they first alighted, down the long ridge—through the half-grown town within its narrow walls, where a few high houses, first evidences of the growth of the wealthy burgher class, alternated with the low buildings which they were gradually supplanting—through the massive masonry of the Port with its battlements and towers to the country greenness and freshness of the Canon's Gate which led to the great convent of the valley, there could be no finer scene for a pageant. Holyrood was one of those great monastic establishments in which kings could find a lodgment more luxurious than in their own castles, and though there would scarcely seem as yet to have been any palace attached to that holy house, it was already a frequent residence of royalty, and with all its amenities of parks and gardens would be more fit for the reception of a young queen coming straight from princely Windsor than the narrow chambers in the castle. Among the many presents which she is said to have brought with her from England there is a special mention of fine tapestries for the adornment of her new habitation.
Thus the royal pair took possession of their kingdom, and of the interest and affection of the lively and eager crowd for which Edinburgh has always been famous—a populace more like that of a French town than an English, though with impulses sometimes leading to tragedy. James would scarcely seem to have been settled in that part of the ancient establishment of the abbey which was appropriated to the lodging of the King, or to have exhausted the thanksgivings of Easter and the rejoicings of the restoration, when he set himself to inquire into the state of the country and of the royal finances, to which he had been so long a stranger. There was no Civil List in those days nor votes of supply, and the state of the Crown lands and possessions, "the King's rents[8]
