The Spell of Scotland Part 10

But, at night, in the royal apartment, the night before the wedding, perhaps in the fragment of the old palace which remains, the gallant king played to the little princess upon the virginal; and then, on bended knee and with unbonneted head, he listened while she played and sang to him. Out of the dark of the time it is a s.h.i.+ning scene; and out of the splendour of the moment it brings a note of tenderness.

Another decade, another August, and the Boroughmoor (where now run the links of Burntland) was covered with the white of a thousand tents, Scotland was gathered for war, the "ruddy lion ramped in gold" floated war-like over all, and James and all Scotland prepared to march down to Flodden, heeding not the warning which had sounded at midnight in ghostly voice at the Town Cross; a warning no doubt arranged by Margaret, never a Stewart, always a Tudor. And--all Scotland was turned into a house of mourning.

Half a century later the history of Scotland came to a climax, and Mary Stewart came to Holyrood; that queen who then and ever since held half the world in thrall, like another Iseult. The covenanted world has rejected her, as no doubt it would reject Iseult.

Shrouded in a gray "haar" from off the North Sea, rising like a Venus out of the mists of the sea, Mary Stewart, Dowager of France, Queen of Scotland, Heiress of England, came unto her own. And, her own received her, and, received her not.

The castle hanging high in air no longer hung there. The palace lying low on the plain was not there, on that August 19, 1561. There was nothing but what was near at hand; Mary could not see a hundred feet into her kingdom. In truth she arrived at port a week before the s.h.i.+p was expected--and Mary also flashed through her kingdom; witness the ride across the Marches to the Hermitage, and the ride through the North to punish Huntley. Hers was a restless soul, a restless body.

On her return to the kingdom she was accompanied by a great retinue, three of her French uncles of Guise and of Lorraine, her four Maries, and many amba.s.sadors. It was a suspended moment in the world, the sixth decade of the sixteenth century. And nowhere were affairs in such delicate balance, or so like to swing out of balance as in Scotland; where religion, sovereignty, feudalism, morality, were swaying dizzily.

So all the world sent their keenest amba.s.sadors to observe, to foresee if possible, to report.

Yet Mary rode through the mists.

"Si grand brouillard," says the Sieur de Brantome, that gossipy chronicler, and Mary and her French courtiers and Scotch Maries, rode through the "haar," from Leith up whatever was the Leith Walk of that day to Holyrood.

The palace must have rung with French chatter, of these wondering and inquisitive and critical folk; for all the cultured world was French in those days, and Mary and her Maries had been only five or six when they left stormy Scotland for the pleasant smiling land of France.

Not for long was she permitted to believe she had brought France back with her and there was no reality in Scotland but as she made it.

Reformation pressed in upon her, even through the windows of this turret where again she seems to listen to that prophetic and pious serenade, Scottish protestant psalms accompanied by fiddles and sung to a French Catholic queen. "Vile fiddles and rebecks," complains Brantome, hesitating to call vile the mob of five hundred gathered in the Scotch mists; but they sang "so ill and with such bad accord that there could be nothing worse. Ah, what music, and what a lullaby for the night!"

The rooms of Mary are still inclosed, the walls still stand about them, and a romantic care withholds the ravages of time from those tapestries and silken bed hangings, dark crimson damask, which Mary drew about her on that night of her return. And here hangs a picture of Queen Elizabeth, authentic, Tudoresque, which did not hang here when Mary returned; but what dark shadow of Elizabeth lurked behind these hangings! The very guard to whom you protest the picture understands--"I think it an insult to her memory."

It is here that Queen Mary still reigns. All the old palace was burned, carelessly, by Cromwell's soldiers, at what time men were caring nothing for palaces, and less for royalty. But, fate was royal, was Jacobite, and this gray turret of the northwest corner a building of James V on a foundation of James IV--perhaps where he had listened in the evening to Margaret and her virginal--was saved from the wrath of the Commonwealth.

Within these very walls Mary played on the virginal, perhaps on the rebeck, and many sought to know her stops--"you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me."

Here she was loved, as she still is loved. Here she made love, the mystery!--as always. Here she flashed those bright eyes on courtiers and commoners and straightway these fell into bondage--the Stewarts never drew the line of division. Here those eyes battled with John Knox as he met her in Dialogues, as John has faithfully recorded. And here those bright eyes filled with a storm of tears at his denunciation; but Knox felt their power. Here she met Darnley, in the chapel married him, and Knox called after dinner to declare that the Reformation did not approve. Here by the very stairs of the turret Darnley led the murderers on Rizzio, from his private apartments to hers. (I find it fit that Ker of Fawdonside, one of the murderers, should have married later the widow of Knox.) Mary was held here a prisoner; they would "cut her into collops and cast her over the wall" if she summoned help. But Mary could order that the blood stains of the fifty-six wounds of Rizzio should remain "ane memoriall to quychen her revenge." They quicken our thought of Mary to-day--if we accept them. From Holyrood Mary went to Kirk o'

Field on a Sunday night in February to visit Darnley who lay "full of the small pox." He had come back from Bothwell castle on Mary's urging; but he had gone to Bothwell to escape her revenge for Rizzio.

She returned to Holyrood--"the Queen's grace gang and with licht torches up the Black Friar's Wynd"--where the wedding festivities of a member of her household were in progress. And, I doubt not, devoted to Mary as I am, that she was the merriest of the company.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Bothwell Castle_]

Then the dark.

Then, at two in morning, an explosion that shook all Edinburgh, that astonished the world, that still reverberates through the world.

Then--the dark.

A marriage, at two in the morning, a flight to Borthwick, a meeting at Carberry, one more night in Edinburgh, in a house as mean as that of Kirk o' Field, a day at Holyrood, and a forced ride with ruffian n.o.bles, Lindsay and Ruthven on each hand, to Loch Leven, thirty miles in the night of June 16, 1567--and Edinburgh and Holyrood and the Crown of Scotland know her no more.

"Helen's lips are drifting dust, Ilion is consumed in rust."

And Mary. And Holyrood.

There is one more Holyrood scene descending from this. On a Sat.u.r.day evening, March 26, 1603, the son of Mary, the King of Scotland, supped with the Queen, perhaps in that small supper room where Rizzio was supping with a queen; and they had retired. "The palace lights were going out, one by one." And Sir Robert Carey, three days out from London, clattered into the courtyard, the King was roused, Sir Robert knelt before him--

"Queen Elizabeth is dead, and Your Majesty is King of England!"

James I of England, James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, son of Darnley, son of the ninth generation from Bruce, The Bruce. The "auld enemy" is finally defeated; and to borrow again from Rosaline Ma.s.son, "the lights of Holyrood went out, one by one."

In the long picture gallery of this dull modern palace, nothing of which either Mary or James ever saw, there hangs a series of portraits, one hundred pictures of Scottish kings, painted under order of Charles II in 1680, by the Fleming, DeWitt, who agreed to furnish the pictures in two years for one hundred and twenty pounds. They begin with Fergus I, 330 B. C. They are the kings who pa.s.sed before the prophetic vision of Banquo. Enough to frighten Macbeth!

One brief brilliant ghost of Stewart glory returns. In this gallery was held the ball of Prince Charles Edward, described in "Waverley."

And after this theatric moment, and after the Prince had defeated the "royalists" at Falkirk, Hardy's dragoons slashed these pictures of Scottish kings, since the Prince they could not reach.

_Princes Gardens_

There are certain public places of beauty where the beauty is so enveloping that the place seems one's very own, seems possessed. That, I take it, is the great democratic triumph, in that it has made beauty a common possession and places of beauty as free to the people as is the air.

Chief of these is Princes Street Gardens.

I could, in truth I have, spent there days and half-days, and twilights that I would willingly have lengthened to midnights, since the northern night never quite descends, but a romantic gray twilight veils everything, and evokes more than everything. For any lengthened visit in Edinburgh I dare not inhabit a hotel room on the Garden side, since all my time would be spent at the window. For a shorter visit, such a room lengthens the day, defies the closed gate of the Gardens.

It was from such a window as this, "From a Window in Princes Street"

that Henley looked forth--

"Above the crags that fade and gloom Starts the bare knee of Arthur's Seat; Ridged high against the evening bloom The Old Town rises, street on street; With lamps bejeweled, straight ahead, Like rampird walls the houses lean, All spired and domed and turreted, Sheer to the valley's darkling green; Ranged in mysterious array, The Castle menacing and austere, Looms through the lingering last of day; And in the silver dusk you hear, Reverberated from crag and scar, Bold bugles blowing points of war."

Princes Street is, I believe, not a mile long, a half-mile the part which is gardened. It is the loveliest street in the world. It seems infinite instead of half-mile.

Of course to the loyal American that praise is received half-way. For he remembers Riverside Drive with the majesty of the Hudson, North Sh.o.r.e Drive with the sh.o.r.eless infinity of Lake Michigan, Summit Avenue with the deep gorge of the Upper Mississippi, Quebec and its Esplanade.

But even these "handsome streets" cannot match Princes for history and beauty in one, for the old and the new, for the Old Town and the New Town.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PRINCES STREET.]

Princes Street, to speak briefly of its geography, is a broad thoroughfare, with a medley of buildings on the north side, but uniform in gray stone, where hotels and shops furnish the immediate life of the city. There are electric cars running the full length of the street; and it is the only street I know which is not spoiled through the presence of these necessary carriers.

There are cabs, and there are sight-seeing cars, from which in high advantage, and in half a day, you can see everything in Edinburgh.

Yes, actually. I who speak to you have done it, partly for the greed of seeing it steadily and seeing it whole, and partly for the comment of these Scotch coach drivers and guards, who are not merely Scottish but the essence of Scotland. I shall never forget how an American traveler--of course they are all Americans in these tally-hos--commenting on the driver's remark that the "Old Queen" wanted to build a palace where Donaldson's Hospital now stands and she was refused--"but she was the Queen!" Nevertheless, a.s.serted Mr. Sandy Coachman, "She was refused." Not so in the old days of Queens.h.i.+p.

The entire life of Edinburgh, of Scotland, streams through this broad straight street.

On the opposite side lie the Gardens, stretching their way parallel with the street, a wide, green-lawned, tree-forested purlieu, terraced and flowered, with a "sunken garden" near the Castle-side, through which trains are conveyed. The smoke, so much lamented, does often rest with grace and gray loveliness in the hollows of the place, so that one does not miss the waters of the Nor' Loch that once flowed here as moat.

Above rises the castle in greater majesty than from any other point.

Down from the castle runs the ridge of the High Street, and the high _lands_ with flags of was.h.i.+ng hanging out the windows which answer the flags red and leoninely rampant, on the buildings of Princes Street. The crown of St. Giles and the spire of the Tronkirk hanging above all.

To the west is St. John's, where in the graveyard Raeburn is buried; and old St. Cuthbert's, where in the graveyard De Quincey is buried. There are Raeburns in the Royal gallery which stands on the island dividing the Gardens, and there are many Raeburns here and there, in private rooms of banks and other inst.i.tutions, rare Raeburns with that casual, direct, human look he could give men and women. The galleries are worth a visit both for their best, and for their not-best. There are statues of famous Scotsmen on the terraces, and of course the Scott monument, beautifully Gothic, and as sacred as a shrine.

There are goods to be bought in the shops, pebbles and cairngorms in jewelry and kickshaws of that ilk; rugs and plaidies, sashes and ties, and Scott and Stevenson books bound in the Royal Stewart silk. Unhappy the traveler who has not provided himself beforehand with a tartan.

Almost every one can if he will. And there is always the college of heraldry to help one out. Or the audacity of choosing the tartan you like best; an affront, I a.s.sure you, to all good Scots. For however unlovely a Scotch tartan may be in the eyes of the world--nominations are invidious--in the eyes of the clansman there is nothing so "right"

as his own particular tartan. He would not exchange it for a Dougla.s.s or a Stewart.

These tartans have exerted a very marked effect on the Scottish sense of taste. On Princes Street you may not find such richly dressed women as on Regent Street, but the harmony of colouring will please you better.

While no doubt this is due to the fact that for several hundred years the Scottish taste has had the benefit of intimate a.s.sociation with the French, it can also be traced to the longer centuries during which tartans have brought an understanding of colour harmonies. Because there has been this love of colour, there has come with it vanity. With vanity there has come that rare ability of the women of the race to maintain a unity, a harmony, a complete relations.h.i.+p between skirts and waists.

There is no country in Europe where the "act of union" at the feminine waistline is so triumphant as in Scotland, particularly in Edinburgh.

The universal American achievement has been equaled in Europe only in Scotland.