The Spell of Scotland Part 8

I suppose one may spend a lifetime in Edinburgh, with frequent days in the Old Town, wandering the High Street, with the eye never wearying, always discovering the new. And I suppose it would take a lifetime, born in Old Town and of Old Town, to really know the quarter. I am not certain I should care to spend a lifetime here; but I have never and shall never spend sufficient of this life here. It is unsavoury of course; it is slattern, it is squalid, danger lurks in the wynds and drunkenness spreads itself in the closes. If the old warning cry of "Gardey loo!" is no longer heard at ten o' the night, one still has need of the answering "Haud yer hand!" or, your nose. Dr. Samuel Johnson, walking this street on his first night in Edinburgh, arm in arm with Boswell, declared, "I can smell you in the dark!" No sensitive visitor will fail to echo him to-day. There are drains and sewers, there is modern sanitation in old Edinburgh. But the habits of the centuries are not easily overcome; and the Old Town still smells as though with all the old aroma of the far years. Still, it is high, it is wind-swept--and what of Venice, what of the Latin Quarter, what of Mile End, what of the East Side?

But there is still splendour and power, bequeathed as Taylor said, "from antiquitie to posteritie," in spite of the decline and the decay. If the palace of Mary of Lorraine on Castle Hill is fallen and the doorways are in the Museum--Mary who was mother to Mary Queen, and contemporary worthy to Catherine of Medici--there are still, at the end of the long street, Moray House and Queensberry House. Moray is where Cromwell lodged in 1648, and gave no hint of what was coming in 1649; if he had, history might have been different; to-day Moray House is the United Free Church Training college! Queensberry House is where lived those Queensberry marquises of fighting and sporting renown, and where the Marquis lived who forced through the Act of Union--"There ended an old song"; and now it is the Refuge for the Dest.i.tute!

[Ill.u.s.tration: MORAY HOUSE.]

There is still beauty s.h.i.+ning through the dust and the cobwebs; here a doorway with bold insignia and exquisite carving, leading to--nowhere; here a bit of painting, Norrie's perhaps, or a remnant of timbered ceiling; and everywhere, now as then--more now than then, since sanitary destruction has had its way here and there--glimpses of the city and the moors and the mountains.

It is invidious to compare, to choose from these closes. Each has its history, its old habitations, its old a.s.sociations, its particular picturesqueness; Lady Stair's, Baxter's, Byer's, Old Stamp Office, White Horse, and many more.

Through this street what glory that was Scotland has not pa.s.sed and what degradation, what power has not been displayed and what abas.e.m.e.nt? To see it now, filled with people and with marching troops in honour of the visiting king, is to get back a little of ancient history, of greater glory. It lends itself to such majesty, dull and deserted as it is for the most part.

When the King came to Edinburgh following on his coronation, making a pilgrimage of his realm, he came to St. Giles, as has come every sovereign of Scotland, from Malcolm who may have wors.h.i.+ped in the Culdee church, to George in whose honour the chapel of the Thistle and the Rose was unveiled.

"For noo, unfaithfu' to the Lord Auld Scotland joins the rebel horde; Her human hymn-books on the board She noo displays, An' Embro Hie Kirk's been restored In popish ways."

On a Sunday morning I hurried to St. Giles to see the trooping of the colours. (Later, listening to Dr. White, in a recently built reformed church on Princes Street, I heard a sermon from the text, "You shall see the king in all his beauty." But, no mention of King George! It was even as it was in the old days.)

In truth it was a brave sight to find the High Street thronged with people, and the regiments marching down from St. Giles to Holyrood. The king did not enter town till next day. (I saw, with some resentment, over the door of a public house, the motto, "Will ye no come back again?") But, somehow, so many kings gone on, the play was rather better staged with the sovereign not there. I learned then how gorgeous the old days must have been with their colour and glitter and flash.

[Ill.u.s.tration: INTERIOR OF ST. GILES.]

I suppose there was a tall _land_ where in my day stood and still stands Hogg's hotel, just above the Tron Kirk; the _lands_ on the south side the High burned a century ago. But, to the American gazing down on ancient memories and present sovereignties, there was a wonderful courtesy shown by the hotel. I had interrupted their quiet Sabbath; it can still be quiet in Edinburgh notwithstanding that a tram car carried me on my way hither. The dining-room of this hotel looked out on the High, and it was breakfast time for these covenanting-looking guests from the countryside. But I, an invader, was made welcome and given the best seat on the balcony; a stranger and they took me in. Sometime I shall take up residence in this Latin Quarter, and if not in Lady Stair's Close, then in Hogg's hotel. The name sounds sweeter if you have just come up from Ettrick.

Nor did I miss the King. For

"I saw pale kings, and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; Who cry'd--'La Belle Dame sans merci Hath thee in thrall!'"

It was the Belle Dame, it was the Queen, I saw most often on the High Street, riding to and fro from the time of the "haar" on her return from France, till that last terrible night and the ride to Loch Leven.

After that you may visit the John Knox house if you will, and read for your edification its motto. "Lyfe G.o.d aboune al and yi nicht-bour as yi Self," and buy a book or two in its book shop. I took particular pleasure in buying a girlish picture of Mary Queen, and a book of the poems of Robert Fergusson, neither of which would have pleasured John.

After that you may look at the "I. K." in the pavement, and realize that Dr. Johnson's wish for Knox has been fulfilled--"I hope in the highway."

After that you may look on the heart stamped in the pavement near St.

Giles, where once stood the Heart of Midlothian, the Old Tolbooth.

There is only one other memory of High Street and of Scotland that for me equals that of Mary. It is Montrose. Up the Canongate comes the rumbling of a tumbril, like the French Revolution. And out of the high _lands_ there look the hundreds of Covenanting folk, triumphant for the moment. And on the balcony of Moray House, within which the marriage of Lady Mary Stewart to the Marquis of Lorne has just been celebrated, there stands the wedding party, and among them the Earl of Argyle. Up the street comes the cart. And within it clad like a bridegroom--"fyne scarlet coat to his knee, trimmed with silver galoons, lined with taffeta, roses in his shoon, and stockings of incarnet silk"--stands the Marquis of Montrose, the loyalest Scotsman that ever lived.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN KNOX'S HOUSE.]

After the field of Kylsyth, after the field of Philipshaugh, and the flight to the North and the betrayal, he has been brought back to Edinburgh, to a swift and covenanting sentence, and to death at the Tron.

His eyes meet proudly those of Argyle who has deserted his king and who thinks to stand in with the Covenant and with the future. It is the eyes of Argyle which drop. And Montrose goes on.

His head is on the picket of the Netherbow Port. His four quarters are sent to the four corners of the kingdom, Glasgow, Perth, Aberdeen, Inverness.

But the end is not yet. The tables turn, as they turned so often in those unstable times. It is Argyle who goes to the scaffold. Charles is king, the Second Charles. There is an edict. The body of Montrose is dug up out of the Boroughmoor. It is buried in Holyrood. The four quarters are rea.s.sembled from Glasgow and Perth and Aberdeen and Inverness. A procession fairly royal moves from Holyrood to St. Giles. At the Netherbow it pauses. The head is taken down from the pike. The body of Montrose is whole again. An honourable burial takes place in the cathedral sanctuary.

Even though when search was made at the restoring of the church and the erection of the effigy the remains could not be found, there has been that justification by procession and by faith, that justification of loyalty that we remember when we remember Montrose--

"He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, That dares not put it to the touch, To gain or lose it all."

_Holyrood_

Holyrood, ruined as it is, empty as it is, spurious as it is, still can house the Stewarts. Nowhere else are they so completely and splendidly Stewart. It is the royalest race which ever played at being sovereign; in sharp contrast with the heavier, more successful Tudors; crafty but less crafty than the Medici; amorous but more loyal than the Bourbons.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JAMES GRAHAM, MARQUIS OF MONTROSE.]

Never did kings claim sovereignty through a more divine right--and only one (whisper sometimes intimates that he was not Stewart, but subst.i.tute; but he left a Stewart descent) failed to pay the penalty for such a.s.sertion. It was the splendour which was Stewart while they lived, the tragedy that was Stewart when they came to die, which makes them the royal race.

There were born in Holyrood not one of them, unless it be James V. But almost all of them were married in Holyrood, held here their festive days, and, not one of them died in Holyrood. It is their life, the vivid intense flash of it, across those times that seem mysterious, even legendary in remembered times north of the Border. Life was a holiday to each of the Stewarts, and he spent it in the palace and in the pleasance of Holyrood.

The Abbey, with the monastery which was attached to it, begins far back before the Stewarts. It was founded by David I, the abbey-builder.

Legend has it that he went a-hunting on a holy day, and straying from the "noys and dyn of Bugillis," a white stag came against him. David thought to defend himself, but a hand bearing a cross came out of the cloud, and the stag was exorcised. David kept the cross. In dream that night within the castle he was commanded to build an abbey where he had been saved, and the hunting place being this scant mile and a quarter from the castle--then a forest where now it is treeless--David placed this convenient abbey where it has stood for six centuries, defying fire and war and reformation, until the citizens of Edinburgh ravaged it when the roof fell in in the middle of the eighteenth century.

There is a curious feeling when one crosses the Girth stones at the lower end of the Canongate. It is a century and more since this was sanctuary. But it is impossible to step across these stones, into the "Liberty of Holyrood," and not wonder if there may not perhaps be some need in your own soul of sanctuary. Thousands and thousands of men--"abbey lairds" as they were pleasantly called--have stepped across this line before me, through the centuries. Who am I to be different, unneedful? May I not need inviolate sanctuary? May it not be that at my heels dogs some sinister creditor who will seize me by the skirts before I reach the boundary beyond which there is no exacting for debt? A marvelous thing, this ancient idea of sanctuary. It made an oasis of safety in a savage world. Surely it was super-christian. And here, at Holyrood, as the medieval statute declares, "qukilk privelege has bene inviolabie observit to all maner of personis c.u.man wythin the boundes ... past memorie of man." What has the modern world given itself in place of ancient sanctuary? Justice, I suppose, and a jury trial.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HOLYROOD PALACE.]

But, once across the Girth, one becomes, not a sanctuarian, but a Stewart.

The situation is a little dreary, a little flat. And the palace, as a palace, is altogether uninteresting to look on. It is not the building of David or of the earlier Stewarts. But of that Merry Monarch who harboured so long in France, when England was determining whether it would be royal or republican, and Scotland was determining whether it would be covenanted or uncovenanted. The Merry Monarch was ever an uncovenanted person, not at all Scottish, although somewhat like the errant James--whose errancy was of his own choosing. Charles had acquired a French taste at the court of his cousin, Louis the Grand. So the new Holyrood was built in French baronial style. And no monarch has ever cared to inhabit it for any length of time. Only King Edward VII, who would have been a happy successor to James, but Edward was very studious in those days of 1859, when he lodged here and studied under the direction of the Rector of the Royal High School. Still I can but think that it was in this Stewart place that Edward developed his Stewarts.h.i.+p.

There is not a stone to speak of the magnificence, of the strength, of David. The Abbey was burned and burned again, by Edward and Richard the Second, and entirely rebuilt when the Stewarts were beginning to be splendid and a.s.sured. Over the west doorway, high-arched and deep-recessed, early English in its technique, Charles I, who was crowned here in 1633, caused the stone to be placed.

"He shall build ane House for my name and I will stablish the throne of his kingdom forever."

The tablet still stands above the doorway. But Charles is lying for his sins in a vault at St. George's chapel at Windsor far in the south, having paid his penalty on the scaffold in Whitehall. And the House is in ruins, "bare ruined choir," where not even "the late birds sing."

Although Mendelssohn in speaking of the impression the Abbey made on him, does say, "I think I found there the beginnings of my Scotch symphony."

This "magnificent Abbey-Kirk of Halirude" was no doubt very splendid; although in architectural beauty it cannot compare with Melrose, not even the great east window with its rich quatrefoil tracing. But what scenes have been staged in that historic drama, that theatrical piece, we call the history of the Stewarts!

Before the high altar, under that east window, when James I was kneeling before G.o.d in prayer, there appeared the Lord of the Isles, come repentant from burning Inverness and other rebellion, to kneel before the king, his own sword pointed at his breast.

Before this altar James II was married to Mary of Gueldres. James III was married to Margaret of Denmark, who brought the Orkneys as her dower. James IV was married to Margaret Tudor, the union of the "Thistle and the Rose." James V was not married here, he went to France for his frail bride, Magdalene, who lived but seven weeks in this inhospitable land, this hospitable Holyrood. She was buried in Holyrood chapel, only to be dug up and tossed about as common clay when the Edinburgh citizens made football of royal skulls.

The two sons of James VI, Henry who should have been king and who might have united royalist and commoner had fate granted it, and Charles who was to become king, were both christened here. James VII, brother to Charles II, restored this Chapel Royal and prepared it for the Roman ritual. James VIII was never here, or but as a baby. Charles III--did the Bonnie Prince in that brief brilliant Edinburgh moment of his, ever kneel before this then deserted altar and ask divine favour while he rea.s.serted the divine right of kings?

Here--or was it secretly, in Stirling?--the Queen--one says The Queen and all the world knows--gowned in black velvet, at five o'clock on a July morning, was married to her young cousin, Henry Darnley. A marriage that endured two long terrible tumultuous years.

Here--or was it in the drawing-room?--at two o'clock on a May morning, the Queen was married to Bothwell, by Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney, not with ma.s.s as she had been wed to her boy-cousin, but with preaching as she wed the Bishop's cousin. And "at this marriage there was neither pleasure nor pastime used as use was wont to be used when princes were married." So says the Diurnal Occurents of Scotland. A marriage that endured a brief, perhaps happy, tragedy-gathering month.

And the Queen beautiful was destroyed, by the Reformation, like an Abbey.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JAMES IV.]

The bones of Darnley were ravaged by the citizens of Edinburgh out of the ruins of this chapel. Or were they carried to Westminster by that unroyal son who was so laggard in caring for the remains of his queenly mother? I hope that Darnley does not rest beside her. For I think those exquisite marble fingers of the effigy in Henry VII's chapel, looking I fain believe as those of Mary looked, tapering, lovely, sinister, would not so fold themselves in prayer without unfolding through the long centuries.