CHAPTER VIII.

THE ASSOCIATIONS OF THE BUILDINGS.

In the preceding pages a description was given of the buildings of the castle as they stand at the present day. In this chapter the purpose is to remind the reader of the celebrated events that took place within or beside these existing edifices, and to enable him to picture to himself some of the scenes that have been enacted on the “well-trod stage” of Stirling rock.

Since the gay days of the Jameses, and still more since the troubled years of Robert Bruce, important changes have been wrought in the buildings that have occupied Snowdon Crag. War has done its work of destruction; government officials have disfigured noble halls; fire has eaten up the dwelling-rooms of kings; and monarchs themselves have sometimes thought it right to remove the ancient landmarks which their fathers had set. Yet there still remains at Stirling a large cluster of historical buildings sufficient to make the castle the most notable place of its kind in Scotland, if not in the British Isles.

The first thing to strike the visitor after he has passed through Queen Anne’s gateway is the ancient Keep, with its corbelled turrets, that rises from the lawn and the Prince’s Walk. Associations lend interest to the beauty, for there is the staircase leading to the schoolroom where George Buchanan taught and punished his wilful pupil, James VI., and on the terrace below the old wall that King’s eldest son, Prince Henry, was accustomed to walk when released by his tutor for a few minutes’ breathing-space in the fresh air. Other incidents are quickly brought to mind on this same approach to the castle. Just in front is James IV.’s entrance, shorn, it is true, of its lofty towers, but still the same archway that witnessed, besides other memorable events, two striking scenes in the time of James V. The first was when Margaret Tudor, standing hand-in-hand with her son, the young King, rang down the portcullis in these self-same grooves, suddenly placing the ponderous grating between her precious child and the Regent Albany’s dumfoundered commissioners. The second occurrence took place some years later when James had become a grown man. A panting horse clattered up the ascent, bearing a stern-eyed, hard-visaged monarch. At the side ran Archibald Douglas of Kilspindie, almost collapsing with fatigue, but gazing into the rider’s face in his eagerness to catch a look of recognition. Here, at the entrance, Kilspindie sank down exhausted, while the King, unheeding, rode on through the archway into the castle yard. In his exile Douglas had thought the English people too proud, “and that they had too high a conceit of themselves, joined with a contempt and despising of all others.” But his treatment at the hands of his sovereign and former friend must have been the bitterest experience of his life. No affront that he received in England had been harder to bear than this. It would be difficult to find in history a more cruel, silent rebuff.

On emerging from the tunnel gateway the stranger is confronted by the great imposing gable of the Parliament House. This building, although altered and much defaced, is still a majestic pile, and is noteworthy as having almost certainly been erected under the directorship of Cochrane, the architect, one of James III.’s unpopular favourites. Poor Cochrane was hanged at Lauder Bridge on the famous occasion when the Earl of Angus thought fit to “Bell the Cat,” and show the King that Scottish nobles would not suffer art-loving upstarts to usurp the high places at Court. The quaint, twisted entrance below the old Mint, to the north of the Parliament House, was the way of approach to the castle up till the following reign, so that often in his later years, when James III. rode into his courtyard, he must have shuddered as he caught sight of the building that reminded him of Cochrane and his miserable fate.

The Palace, which is chief among Stirling Castle’s buildings, can be viewed on one of its three elaborate sides from this same spot near James IV.’s gateway. Often must King James V. have walked about this ground while the walls of his stately house were rising, and many a day he doubtless stood watching the workmen shaping the pillars and carving the curious figures. Out of these windows, before they were barred, have looked Mary of Guise and the Regent Arran, and unhappy Queen Mary has lain within these walls weeping sorely at the hardness of her lot. Then came the time when the infant Prince James was brought for his safety to Stirling, the stronghold that was to become his home throughout his boyhood’s years. Yet, in the turmoil of politics and religion, the royal child’s anxious guardians felt that the strong position of the castle was not sufficient protection for their precious charge. Consequently, the windows on the main floor of the Palace were grated with heavy iron bars--the work, it is said, of a St. Ninian’s blacksmith--which yet remain firmly fixed in their stones to remind the peace-loving generations of the perilous days of the past. Many a night has James VI. lain sleepless behind these gratings, dreading lest by the morning light he should be carried a prisoner to Edinburgh or Dumbarton.

From the upper square of the castle another side of the Palace can be examined, and from here can best be seen the corner statue of James V., disguised as “The Gudeman o’ Ballengeich.” The Parliament House, having been so much changed for the worse, is hardly worth regarding from this point of view; but the past can be recalled on the north side of the quadrangle, where stands the Chapel of James VI. Immediately after the re-erection of the building, that pillared doorway was thronged with a gay procession, pressing in to witness the baptism of baby Henry, the first-born son of the King of Scots. Great nobles of the kingdom as well as powerful lairds accompanied James and the foreign ambassadors into the sacred edifice; but the interior to-day has such a profaned appearance that even the most imaginative persons find it nearly impossible to picture to themselves the interesting religious ceremony. A number of years later, when James VI. returned from England to visit his native land, the Chapel was the scene of a long series of discourses, which the Regents or Professors of the Edinburgh College delivered to their sovereign in Latin and Greek. As the exterior of the building is almost precisely the same as it was when King James looked with pride upon it, so it is in the doorway again that the pedantic monarch can be summoned up as he slowly leaves the Chapel--where he had followed all the arguments--at the head of a company of courtiers and scholars.

Now let the visitor proceed to the Douglas Garden, a name that conjures up a passionate monarch’s crime. The tall buildings overlooking the lawn do not contain the actual chamber where the Earl of Douglas supped with James II. Fire made away with most of the apartments in this interesting portion of the castle, but fortunately the little closet was spared where the King and his attendants stabbed the nobleman to death. There, above the old archway, it lies open to public view, and the window still exists through which the body was hurled after it had stained with blood the floor of the royal chamber. There is a grim fascination about that little room. The Earl of Douglas, the most powerful lord in Scotland, sat there and quietly but firmly refused to obey his sovereign’s command, till James of the Fiery Face grew hot with indignation and suddenly put an end to the career of his over-powerful subject. The scene as the corpse was flung through the window, while the King stood by half angry and half afraid, can vividly be brought to mind even although the small apartment is not in appearance exactly as it was in the middle of the fifteenth century.

The walk round the wall of the Douglas Garden is in itself a sufficient attraction to bring passing travellers to the summit of the rock. The view is not one that is to be compared with others in Scotland only; it must have a place in the limited list of the world’s most famous prospects. The great blue screen of the Highland mountains, including Ben Lomond, Ben Venue, Ben Ledi and Ben Vorlich, stretches from west to north with an outline of beautiful irregularity. Not in one long chain are the hills, but peak behind peak and row behind row, they appear as a compact phalanx of bens when the mist is lifted from off their heads. Nearer are the Braes of Doune and the fertile fields of the Vale of Menteith, in the midst of which the Forth can be seen gleaming in its lazy windings. The lofty Ochils in the north-east bring the Highlands near to Stirling and form a noble background to the historic Abbey Craig; and in the opposite direction the eye finds rest on the bleak Gargunnock Hills, that serve to shut from the observer’s mind the remembrance that a great city’s turmoil lies not far beyond.

It is not, however, only for the beauty of the distant scene that the wall of the Douglas Garden must be sought; close beside the castle rock many spots of intense historical interest claim a share of attention. The battlefield of Stirling Bridge, where Wallace won his greatest victory, may be observed beyond the Heading Hill--that dismal mound with its stone still showing the marks of the executioner’s axe. Southwards from the scene of conflict the ancient tower of Cambuskenneth Abbey rises from between two reaches of the River Forth. Nearer, on the Gowan Hill, Edward I. placed the military engines that succeeded in breaching the castle wall; and on the same eminence, in 1746, the Jacobites planted a battery. Slightly further to the right is the hollow, now occupied by the houses of the Lower Castle Hill, where Friar Keillor set forth his play before King James V. On the other side of the rock the visitor will notice the extensive elevated tract of land known as the King’s Park. There the Stewart monarchs and their predecessors found delight in the excitement of the chase; there the boy James II. was hunting when Crichton’s men surrounded him and carried him to Edinburgh; there the youthful James VI., rejoicing in the freedom from his guardians and tutors, found such zest in his sport one summer day that he tarried till seven o’clock in the evening, having left the castle at the early hour of five. The field immediately below the rock on this south-west side of the castle was formerly known as the Butt Park, for in olden times it was the place appointed for the practice of archery and for shooting competitions. A little further south the eye can detect the ancient mound called the King’s Knot, past which Edward II. rode when refused admittance to the castle after Bannockburn, and which in the days of the later Jameses formed the centre of an ornamental garden. On account of the change that has come over it, the ground that was once the Justin Flats makes little appeal to the imagination. Villas and gardens cover the level space where Douglases and Burgundian warriors fought for personal glory and national reputation in the presence of young James II.; but the flat nature of the land, well-suited for tournaments, can be made out beyond the King’s Knot. The Field of Bannockburn, or that part of it where the first of the fighting took place, can be distinguished from the commanding position of the Douglas wall, and close beside the scene of Bruce’s triumph may be discerned the site of the battle of Sauchie, which resulted in King Robert’s descendant, James III., fleeing to his death from the presence of his son.

The view from the castle could not fail to have some effect upon the minds of the monarchs who have gazed from the walls. To William the Lion, old and sick, the remembrance of the winding Forth and the purple peaks of Ben Lomond and Ben Ledi came as a light in the darkness, and he urged his attendants to carry him to Stirling that the breezes from the hills of the Lennox and Menteith might blow again upon his aged cheek. When James IV. looked out upon Ben Vorlich he was reminded of the merry hours of hunting near its base, and often did he plan an expedition to Glen Artney when the mountains in one of their genial moods tempted his eager spirit. The effect which the view had on James V. was to arouse in that “King of the Commons” the desire to become acquainted with the customs of the people who inhabited the spacious strath spread out beneath his feet. The burdensome pomp of royalty was gladly thrown aside, and, disguised as “The Gudeman o’ Ballengeich,” he enjoyed for a time the rude society of the humblest of his subjects. The beautiful prospect of mountains and vales brought tears to Queen Mary’s eyes. When at the time of the Prince’s baptism she stole away with an aching heart from the presence of unsympathetic guests and gazed in the direction of the Lake of Menteith, she doubtless recalled how as a little child she had been carried from Stirling to Inchmahome, and she must have felt a passionate longing to recover the golden girlhood days that she might live again through the happy years in France, and make a new beginning to her reign as Scottish Queen. James VI., on the whole, preferred the view towards the east and south to that in the direction of the Highlands. The peace-loving monarch realised that disturbed as was often the state of Lowland Scotland, it was a tranquil part of his realm compared with the region of mountains and glens. A sight of the purple peaks sometimes made him shake his head as he thought of the wild Macgregors and other kilted warriors, and felt that the day was not near at hand for their swords to be turned into ploughshares.

So striking is the beauty and range of the scenery which is displayed before the observer, that even a practical man of affairs of the sixteenth century could not refrain in a business document from expressing his admiration of the view. This was Sir Robert Drummond of Carnock, who, as Master of Works under James VI., drew up a report in 1583 on the condition of the buildings of the castle. His _Inventory_, which is preserved in the Register House at Edinburgh, recommends that the west-quarter of the Palace be pulled down and rebuilt to a height sufficient to make it command the four cardinal points, “by reason it will have the most pleasant sight of all the four airts: in special Park and Garden (deer therein), up the rivers of Forth, Teith, Allan and Goodie to Loch Lomond, a sight round about in all parts, and down the river of Forth where there stands many great stone houses.” This project of Drummond’s was not carried out, probably because of the greatness of the expense. The buildings were doubtless put in repair, but the west side of the Palace remains in the unfinished state in which it was left by the workmen of James V.

The visitor who has knowledge and appreciation of Stirling’s majestic past will leave the castle with a sense that he has existed long before his present life, or with a feeling that the hands of the Clock of Time have gone back and have counted the years again. The early kings, such as William the Lion, Alexander III. and Robert the Bruce, will seem to have passed like ghosts before him, but he will almost persuade himself that he has seen the Regent Morton in the flesh, crossing from the Palace to the Parliament Hall, and George Buchanan, old and infirm, ascending the stair to the schoolroom in the Keep. It may be that he will fancy he has seen some other outstanding figures belonging to the past, for Stirling Castle is not given over to the shades of one or two personalities. A building may be visited by pilgrims on account of its memories of one great individual. It is Queen Mary’s presence that dominates still the deserted chambers at Holyrood and Craigmillar, and that gives Loch Leven Castle the glamour which its other associations have failed to impart; but although the famous Queen of Scots spent many days at Stirling, the castle is so wealthy in romantic history that the elsewhere pre-eminent personality here takes its place side by side with other figures and does not occupy the forefront of the pageant of the shades.