CHAPTER I

EDINBURGH CASTLE: ITS LEGENDS AND ROMANCES

There, watching high the least alarms, Thy rough, rude fortress gleams afar; Like some bold veteran, gray in arms, And marked with many a scamy scar; The ponderous wall and massy bar, Grim rising o’er the rugged rock, Have oft withstood assailing war, And oft repelled the invader’s shock.

BURNS.

The great line of east coast lying between the two headlands of Norfolk and Aberdeenshire is nowhere broken by another so bold and graceful indentation as that of the Firth of Forth. The Forth has its birth among hills that look down on Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond; flows thence in a pretty tortuous course towards the east, forming a boundary-line between the countries of the Gael and the Sassenach; is replenished by the Teith from the Trossachs and by the Allan from Strathmore; meanders at the foot of Stirling Castle, and seems never to weary of weaving its silver windings into that green expanse of country where most the Scottish imagination loves to linger; until at last, when there is poured into it the Devon from the Ochils, its channel widens to the sea somewhat suddenly. But even here the diverging banks, once so near, show an occasional friendly inclination to meet; and at one point there is only a mile of blue water and white waves between them, and then the view widens and the shores part irrevocably, the one stretching away to the extreme “east neuk” of Fife, and looking

To Norroway, to Norroway, To Norroway ower the faem!

and the other rolling with softer curves to the South and England, while the great German Ocean ebbs and flows between.

The point where the banks of the Forth are but a mile apart is now spanned by that triumph of engineering, the Forth Bridge,--the largest bridge in the world; but in olden days there was here a famous crossing, and the names of the villages on the opposite banks, North Queensferry and South Queensferry, still carry the mind back to the days when Malcolm Canmore’s stately Saxon Queen, Saint Margaret of Scotland, was ferried across here on her way between the palace of Dunfermline and the Castle of Edinburgh. Edinburgh was not then, nor for centuries after, the Capital of Scotland, but merely a useful stronghold near the Borders,--a great rock rising abruptly among woods and lochs and hills, on which, from before the earliest legends of history, a fortress had stood,--an impregnable castle, built so long ago that none knows its origin, nor even the origin of its name. Stow’s _Chronicle_, indeed, dates the foundation of the “Castell of Maydens” 989 B.C., which is a sensational date to mention lightly to the inquiring tourist from the newer world. It is supposed that the name “Castell of Maydens” was gained because, in legendary days, certain Pictish princesses were kept there for safety; and certainly, from those hazy times right on till the time of Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was sent to the Castle for security before the birth of King James, Edinburgh Castle has always been a useful place of safety to which to send royalties and rebels.

The earliest authentic romance of Edinburgh Castle is that of Malcolm Canmore and Queen Margaret; and the oldest building extant in Edinburgh is Queen Margaret’s chapel in the Castle.

The well-known story of Queen Margaret, the grand-niece of Edward the Confessor, is that she and her brother Edgar Atheling and her sister Christian all fled from England and William the Conqueror, and were wrecked in the Firth of Forth. The King of Scotland, Malcolm Canmore, was the son of that Duncan whom Macbeth put out of the way--in Scottish history as well as in Shakespeare’s play,--and he had fled from the usurper, and had spent his years of exile at the Saxon Court of Edward the Confessor.

The son of Duncan From whom this tyrant holds the due of birth Lives in the English court; and is received Of the most pious Edward with such grace That the malevolence of fortune nothing Takes from his high respect.

Little wonder that he received the Saxon exiled royal family hospitably. He was a widower, and much older than the Princess Margaret, and a warrior-prince; and he married her at Dunfermline. It all reads like an old-fashioned fairy story,--the Queen, lovely and pious, washing the feet of the poor, founding abbeys and endowing the Church, and filling the Scottish Court with luxury of gold plate and rich raiment, and the pomp of royal guards: the King, brave, warlike, and unlearned, kissing his wife’s missals he was unable to read, and sending for his goldsmith to bind one of them in vellum incased in gold and set with jewels, and then hurrying off to the wars with England, and bringing back English captives to serve as slaves in Scottish homes. The fairy story ends as romantically as it began, for the last chapter tells of the winter days when King Malcolm and his two eldest sons were laying siege to Alnwick Castle to revenge a Scottish garrison, and Queen Margaret, dangerously ill, watched and waited with her group of younger children and her Confessor, Bishop Turgot, at Edinburgh Castle. Bitterly cold it must have been in the Castle, where the bleak wind would howl at night, and the snow melt as it fell on the rough masonry jutting out of the rougher rock. Below, the leafless winter woods skirted wild morasses and lochs, and stretched over hill and dale to the line of sea--that sea where the Queen had been wrecked nearly a quarter of a century before, and which she had crossed so often by ferry. But, in spite of cold and suffering, the ascetic Queen spent her time in the little stone oratory in prayer and vigil for her absent lord. On the fourth day Prince Edgar, the second son, returned, and told his dying mother that her husband and her firstborn son had both been killed. Queen Margaret, with words of prayer and resignation, died almost immediately after hearing the news. This was on the 16th of November 1093. Hardly had Bishop Turgot and the royal orphans closed the mother’s eyes before they were roused by new troubles. They looked down over the fortress walls and saw the Castle hill surrounded by what must have seemed to them a horde of howling savages,--men dressed in the skins of deer, with “hauberks of jingling rings.” These were the Highlanders from the Hebrides, whither Donald Bane, Malcolm’s younger brother, had fled when Malcolm had gone to England. The Hebrides and the Saxon Court had educated the two brothers somewhat differently; and now, after long years, Donald Bane had come hopefully and cheerfully forth to kill his nephews and make himself King. But not in vain had Queen Margaret lived the life of a saint. Up from the Firth of Forth on that November day in 1093 there came a crawling white mist, creeping over the woods and morasses, covering the hills, leaving white density in its trail, till it blotted the whole Castle out of sight of the enemy below. And who are these figures that come stealing out of the western postern into the white woolly mist? And what is the burden they bear so reverently? These are the royal orphan children and the faithful Confessor, Bishop Turgot; and the burden is the dead queen in her coffin. Safely down the precipitous rock, step by step, they carry it,--awe-stricken by the miraculous mist sent by Heaven to help them. Heaven sends many such mists from the Forth into Edinburgh. It sent another to greet Mary, Queen of Scots, when she first landed from France; but then it was not by a Catholic Confessor called a miracle, but by a Presbyterian Reformer an omen. Nowadays they are called “easterly haars.”

And so Queen Margaret made her last journey from Edinburgh Castle across the Forth by ferry to Dunfermline, to the Abbey she had built, where, a century and a half later, silver lamps were kindled on her tomb, for she had been canonised by Pope Innocent IV. Of the group of children who helped to carry their mother’s coffin down through the mist that day, four of the five sons were Kings of Scotland in their turn, and one of the two daughters became a Queen of England.

The Castle was always a safe royal residence; and, though the Scottish Kings had palaces and castles elsewhere, they all lived from time to time in this Castle of Edinburgh. Also, because of its impregnable strength, it was used as a place of safety in which to stow away such things as monks and nuns, political

prisoners, royal brides-elect, young widowed queens, and the coveted persons of infant princes. Scottish sovereigns, especially in the Stuart days, seldom died peaceful deaths; and so there were generally left a youthful queen-widow and a little crowned boy chafing under a long minority in the Castle. Weary days must all these semi-prisoners have spent there, looking out over wooded and hilly country to the Forth.

One such fretted treasure kept in the Castle was Margaret, the daughter of Henry III. of England, when she was betrothed to Alexander III. The King was only ten years old when he married her at York; so the little Queen could not have been very aged, and she complained in letters to her father of the sad and solitary place she was kept in, and that it was “without verdure,” and, “by reason of its vicinity to the sea, unwholesome.”

In the days of Wallace, and of Bruce and Balliol, Edinburgh Castle was the scene of many a fight and many a siege. Edward I. of England, whose name must ever be a black one in Scotland, garrisoned the Castle with English soldiers and took away all the documents of national interest to the Tower of London; and he also stole Queen Margaret’s Black Rood of Scotland; and it was in Queen Margaret’s own little oratory that he received the enforced oaths of fealty from a small band of five Scottish clergy, among them the Abbot of Holyrood, and a Prioress. Sir William Wallace recaptured the Castle, and the English took it again; and then comes a romantic incident of the days of Bruce. The Bruce had entrusted the retaking of Edinburgh Castle to Sir Thomas Randolph of Strathdon. Among Randolph’s soldiers was one named Frank, who, long before this, when he had been stationed at the Castle, had found out a way of getting up and down the Castle Rock in order to visit a sweetheart who lived in the town below. Frank undertook to lead a small body of men up the perilous path he had so often traversed alone. Randolph consented; and, one dark and stormy night in March 1314,--March has ever been a fateful month in Scottish history,--when the howling wind and lashing rain would help to cover the sounds of stealthy climbing, thirty men crept after Frank up the precipitous cliffs, the walls were silently scaled, the English garrison was overpowered, and Edinburgh Castle was once more in the hands of Scots. Randolph, to prevent further fighting, dismantled the whole place; and for twenty-four years the proud old fortress stood silent and deserted,--neither clash of arms nor call of bugle, neither shout of command nor shriek of dying,--only the rain and the sunshine, day after day, high above the city. But this was not to last; and, after all the English garrisons had been driven out, Edinburgh became the favourite residence of David II., the Castle was refortified, and “David’s Tower” built, in which King David II., the last of the Bruce line, died. Since then, no king has died in Edinburgh,--though in Edinburgh many a king has been born and many a king has been married.

When Henry IV. of England besieged the Castle, the young Duke of Rothesay, eldest son of Robert III., was in command,--that gallant and fascinating and profligate prince who was afterwards, tradition and Sir Walter both aver, starved to death at Falkland. From the Castle he looked down on the hated English hosts, and the story is that he sent a challenge to Henry to meet him in mortal combat, with a hundred men of good blood on either side. Although it was the month of August, the invaders had been troubled with excessive rain and cold. The climate of Edinburgh had risen to the occasion; and the chilly Plantagenet on the plain sent a verbal message to the hot Stuart on the height, and hurried home amid dripping banners and rusty lances.

The first of the royal Stuart widows who watched over a baby king in the Castle was Queen Jane,--that gentle consort of the poet King James I., who had seen her first from the window of his English prison, as she walked in the gardens of Windsor.

And therewith cast I down mine eyes again Where as I saw, walking under the Tower Full secretly, new comen her to playn, The fairest and the freshest youngé flower That ever I saw, methought, before that hour: For which sudden abate anon astart The blood of all my body to my heart....

King James had married Jane Beaufort in London at St. Mary Overie,[1] and had brought her back to Scotland with him as his Queen. Thirteen years later he was assassinated in her presence at Perth. It was to Edinburgh Castle that she fled with her little son for safety after the tragedy. But “Fair and false and fickle is the South”; and, less than a year after the murder of the poet King, his “fairest and freshest youngé flower” married Sir John Stuart, the Black Knight of Lorn, and so passed out of view, leaving her little son to be wrangled over by the great rival barons of Scotland.

And now there took place in the Castle one of the most tragic scenes ever enacted there,--the “Black Dinner.” The old Earl of Douglas, head of the great house of Douglas--ever in the history of Scotland struggling for supremacy with the royal house of Stuart--died, and was succeeded by his son, a youth of seventeen. When the young earl surpassed the King in the splendour of his state, and rode out with a retinue of two thousand lances, and sent ambassadors to the Court of France, the ten-year-old King “admired his bold and haughty ways”; but the King’s guardians thought it time to interfere. On the 24th of November 1440 the Earl of Douglas and his only brother and their old adviser, Sir Malcolm Fleming of Cumbernauld, were invited to a banquet at Edinburgh Castle, and their retinue were excluded. Whilst they feasted with the boy King and the Court, suddenly a black bull’s head was set before them. The warlike young Douglases instantly recognised and understood the ancient Scottish symbol of the death-doom, and sprang up, drawing their swords, but were overpowered by armed men, the poor little King being powerless to save them. After a form of trial for treason, the two brothers and Sir Malcolm Fleming were executed on the Castle Hill.

Edinburgh Castle, towne and toure, God grant thou sink for sinne! And that even for the black dinoir Erl Douglas gat therin.

Another story of the Castle is that of the escape of the Duke of Albany, the brother of James III. Albany, imprisoned in the Castle on suspicion of treason, was to die next day. But Albany was twenty years old and full of life and daring; he had a faithful “chalmer chield”[2] in the Castle with him, and he had a strong castle at Dunbar, and knew he would be safe could he reach it. What more was needed? Just what was brought to him concealed within two flasks of French wine--a rope, and an unsigned message that a vessel lay awaiting him in the roads of Leith. The Captain of the Guard and three soldiers were invited to taste the French wine, and “the fire was hett and the wine was strong.” At a late hour Albany “lap from the board and stak the captain with ain whinger.” The drunken soldiers were then despatched, and Albany stole out and knotted the rope over two hundred feet of jagged cliff. The Groom of the Chamber went down first; but the rope was too short, and he fell. The young Duke returned from the cool night air to the hot scene of the butchery, and brought sheets to lengthen the rope. When he reached the bottom of the Castle Rock, this young Stuart who had just killed four men, and who was doomed to death next day, would not forsake a “chalmer chield” with a broken thigh-bone, but carried him on his shoulder the two perilous miles to Leith and safety.

And there to-day stands the Castle, so grim and old and full of memories; but down that northern cliff dangles no rope, and the two miles between the Castle and Leith are two miles of busy, crowded streets.

A few years later, James III. was himself a prisoner in the Castle; and, by a strange irony of fate, it was this same brother, the Duke of Albany, who helped him to escape,--not in the same picturesque fashion he had adopted in his own case, for this time it was the provost and citizens who assisted in place of one “chalmer chield.” For their loyalty, the provost was rewarded with the “Golden Charter,” giving the city magistrates right of Sheriffdom within burgh, and the citizens received their “Banner of Blue,” embroidered by the Queen and her women.

But not all the Castle prisoners had the luck to escape; and some of the memories of the Castle are of dark and dreadful tragedies. Numberless wretches must have languished, their miseries and tortures unknown and unrecorded, in dungeons cut out of the rock, or in noisome dens and cells. The fates of some of those of higher rank are matters of history. It was on the Castle Hill, in the reign of James V., that the beautiful Lady Glammis, on an accusation of treason too readily believed against a Douglas,[3] was burnt alive at the stake in sight of her husband and her little son, Lord Glammis, who were imprisoned in the Castle. The husband, mad with grief and horror, tried to escape during the night that followed, and was dashed to pieces on the cliffs.

The Castle is associated with the name of Mary, Queen of Scots, as closely as with that of Saint Margaret,--two Queens so very different, and yet both Queens of Scotland, and each the mother of a race of Kings. The tourist, when he passes from the dark little Oratory into the room in which James VI. was born, steps across the centuries from the beginning of Scottish history to the close of Scottish history.

It was amid all the unhappiness of Queen Mary’s life and the troubles of her reign, shortly after the brutal scene of Riccio’s murder in her presence, that the Queen was advised, by the Lords of Council, to remain in the Castle until after the birth of her child. Here, then, in the palace of the Castle, can still be seen the tiny, irregularly shaped chamber, scarcely nine feet square, in which King James VI. of Scotland and I. of England was born. And here, from the one small window overlooking the Grassmarket, tradition says that the new-born infant was lowered in a basket to the Catholic friends waiting for him below.

In the days of the last Stuarts, the two Argyles, father and son, were both prisoners in the Castle before their executions; and, after the Stuart dynasty had fallen, the Jacobites often felt the hospitality of Edinburgh Castle. The better class in Edinburgh were very Jacobite in their leanings and sympathies,--Jacobite almost to a man, certainly to a woman. In George I.’s reign many a loyal Scot suffered torture, imprisonment, and death in the Castle; and women of gentle birth were among the Jacobites who endured barbarous treatment for their loyalty to the fallen race.

With every century the outward aspect of the Castle has changed, so that its jagged outline to-day, blotted against the sunset sky, is utterly different from what dwellers in Edinburgh of any other century would have known. But still, looking up at the perpendicular cliffs of the Castle Rock and the strong walls and towers and fortifications that seem part of them, one can picture all those stirring scenes,--the imprisoned “maydens” of dim, legendary days; Queen Margaret and the escape through the miraculous mist; the many sieges; the starving patriotic garrisons; the prisoners in their dungeons; the wild escapes ending in liberty or in death; the brilliant scenes during the reign of James IV., that royal “knight errant,” who sat amid his knights and ladies to watch the tournaments below the Castle walls, and presented a lance tipt with pure Scottish gold to the winner.

Within the Castle much remains. Queen Margaret’s chapel is the oldest bit; but there are also the palace

and the great hall. This great hall was used for all State ceremonials, banquets, and gatherings. It was here, in all likelihood, that Alexander III. held that Council in the Castle on that stormy day in March 1286 before he took horse and rode through the darkness and storm towards Kinghorn, where the bride he had married a few months before awaited him,--rode till, close to his journey’s end, his horse stumbled--a stumble that cost Scotland dear, for it plunged her into two and a half centuries of incessant war.

Quhen Alysander oure Kyng wes dede That Scotland led in luve and lé Away wes sons off ale and brede Off wyne and wax, off gamyn and glé; Our gold wes changed in to lede, Cryst, born in to Vyrgynyté, Succoure Scotland and remede That stad is in perplexyté.

It was in the great hall of the Castle that the treacherous “Black Dinner” was held in James II.’s minority. It was in the great hall that many of the Scottish Parliaments met, for they were always held wherever the King happened to be at the moment, and the King often happened to be in Edinburgh Castle. Here, then, gathered all those grave or stormy Parliaments of Scottish nobles, presided over by a gallant Stuart. Here they discussed the affairs of the brave and troubled kingdom; here they doomed men to death or exile; here they planned wars with the “auld enemy”; here they passed those laws which were “good laws, had they been kept.”

It was in this great hall that Charles I. sat, surrounded by Scottish and English nobles, on a June evening in 1633, at a great banquet given by the Earl of Mar in his honour, the day before he was crowned at Holyrood. It was here that, a few years later, Alexander Leslie, the Covenanting General, gave a banquet to Cromwell and the Covenanting lords, whilst a blue banner waved above them bearing the angry legend, “For an Oppressed Kirk and a Broken Covenant.”

There is another room in the Castle, a smaller room, in which tangible symbols of the days of Scottish independence can be seen. There, under a vaulted roof, on a table covered with glass and set within an iron cage, are the Scottish Regalia. The dim light reveals the rubies and sapphires and diamonds and the big pearls set in the ancient golden diadem of the crown, of date unknown, but which must have rested on the head of the Bruce and have been worn by each of the Stuarts. It was James V., the “Red Tod,” who added to the old diadem the two arches of gold, surmounted by globe and cross; and it was in 1685 that, the former cap of purple having become faded and threadbare during the concealment of the Regalia in the Civil War times, the rather theatrical tiara of crimson velvet, ermine, and pearls was substituted. This is the crown worn by the hapless Mary, Queen of Scots, and that crowned her infant son, James VI., after her forced abdication. This is the crown that was set on the head of Charles I. at Holyrood; and this is what was so pointedly alluded to by the preacher as “a tottering crown,” the last time it was ever worn by a king of Scotland--when Charles II. was crowned and scolded and lectured at Scone. “The Presbyterian solemnity with which it was given to Charles II.,” says Mr. Robert Chambers,[4] “was only a preface to the disasters of Worcester; and, afterwards, it was remembered by this monarch, little to the advantage of Scotland, that it had been placed upon his head with conditions and restrictions which wounded at once his pride and his conscience.”

By the side of the cushion on which the crown rests lies the slender chased sceptre, three little statues on the top--the Virgin, St. Andrew, and St. James--surmounted by a crystal globe. This sceptre, in the hands of the Chancellor of Scotland, has touched each of the acts of the Scottish Parliaments, in token of royal assent. The mace has also a crystal globe, said to have decorated a still more ancient Scottish sceptre. A crystal or beryl of this kind, called in Gaelic “Clach-Buaidh” (stone of victory), tradition avers to have been the badge of the Arch Druid. Its position on the mace and sceptre is, therefore, a symbolic emblem of dateless antiquity. The rich Italian sword of State was a gift from Pope Julius II. to James IV. in 1507. “Taking these articles in connection with the great historical events and personages that enter into the composition of their present value,” writes Mr. Robert Chambers,[5] “it is impossible to look upon them without emotions of singular interest; while at the same time their essential littleness excites wonder at the mighty circumstances and destinies which have been determined by the possession, or the want of possession, of what they emblematise and represent.”

One other romance of the Castle remains to tell--a stout and tangible romance--“the great iron murderer, Muckle Mag,” as Cromwell’s list has it. Mons Meg is thirteen feet long, and weighs four thousand stones. She is the most ancient cannon but one in Europe, and she is a travelled cannon. She accompanied James IV. in 1497 to the siege of Norham (James IV. was fond of ordnance, and forged the “seven sisters of Borthwick” lost at Flodden), and in the Lord High Treasurer’s accounts of her travelling expenses on this occasion she is spoken of with an easy familiarity--

Item, to the menstralis that playit befoir Mons down the gait XIIjs.

Item, giffen for VIIj of cammas, to be Mons a clath to covir hir IXs. IIIjd.

Item, for ijc spikin nalis, to turs with Mons IIjs.

In 1758 she laboriously journeyed as far as England under the mistaken impression that she had become unserviceable, and there for seventy-five years formed one of the sights shown in the Tower of London. In 1829 Sir Walter Scott personally insisted on the return home of what was so dear to the national pride, and the portly prodigal was met at Leith by three troops of cavalry and the 73rd Regiment, and escorted back to the Castle in triumph to the tune of the pipes. With seven huge stone cannon-balls lying beside her, “after life’s fitful fever” she stands on the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle and looks across the new city to the Forth.