The Queen transferred herself and her children to Stirling before the six days had expired, but, as might be supposed, her little triumph was short-lived. Her boyish husband had already shown signs of deserting her, and probably enough her fancy for him was as short-lived as those other ephemeral and still more tragical pa.s.sions which her brother had scarcely yet begun to indulge. The excuse which the Regent and his council put forth for taking the infant King from his mother was partly her second marriage, and partly a supposed plan for carrying off the two children to England, which did actually exist, King Henry being, as a matter of fact, their nearest of kin and most powerful possible guardian, though one who would have been vehemently rejected by all Scotland: while on the other hand the little James was as yet the most likely heir to the English crown. But this scheme had been opposed both by the Queen herself--whose statement that had she been a woman of humble condition she might have taken her children in her arms and gone unknown to her brother, but that, being a queen, she could not move anywhere without observation, is full of homely and natural dignity--and by Gawin Douglas, who repeats the same objection. Margaret, however, did not long continue to identify herself with the Douglases. The conduct of Angus gave her full reason for offence, if, perhaps, she was not altogether guiltless on her side; and they were in a state of absolute estrangement when the calling of a Parliament early in the year 1520 brought Angus to Edinburgh, where with his party he had been sometimes master and sometimes proscribed man in the innumerable variations of politics or rather of personal quarrels and intrigues. Albany had by this time returned to France without however resigning his regency, and authority was more or less represented by the Earl of Arran, who was at the head of the opposite faction. The party of Arran were in possession of Edinburgh and of the little King, now eight years old, who was in the castle under charge of the peers who had been appointed his guardians, when Angus reappeared. Queen Margaret amid all these tumults, finding little encouragement from her brother, who was much more intent on securing a party in Scotland than on consulting her wishes, had also chosen to reside near her boy in the comparative safety of that stronghold. Accordingly when Earl Angus came to attend the Parliament he was confronted by his adversaries in possession of the town and of the castle, with his wife, the most violent adversary of all, in the fortress shut up from his access or approach. He was accompanied, Pitscottie tells us, "with all his kin and friends to the number of five hundred spears, weill accompanied and arrayed." But the city was hostile, and perhaps something in the sombre air of all about awakened the suspicions of the Douglases, especially as the gates were hastily shut behind them and more than usual precautions taken. Awakened thus to a sense of alarm, the threatened party sent scouts out into the streets during the night, to find out what mischief was brewing. While the humbler spies pursued their inquiries by wynd and changehouse, Maister Gawin Douglas, the bishop, went out to see what he could discover of the real state of affairs--if it was true that the westland lords had held a secret meeting and resolved that Angus should not leave Edinburgh now that he had put himself in their power--and "if he could find any gude way betwixt the two parties." In pursuance of this anxious quest he went in search of Archbishop James Beatoun, his brother of St. Andrews, whom he found in the church of the Black Friars, a.s.sisting, it is to be presumed, at some evening service.
"The said Mr. Gawin desired him to take some pains to labour betwixt this two parties which was at ane sharp point, and meaning little less than that the bishop had most part the wyte (blame) thereof.
But the bishop a.s.sured him again with ane oath, chopping on his breast, saying, "By my conscience, my lord, I know not the matter."
But when Mr. Gawin heard the bishop"s purgation, and chopping on his breast, and perceived the plates of his jack clattering, he thought the bishop deceaved him, so Mr. Gawin said to him, "My lord, your conscience is not good, for I hear it clattering.""
[Ill.u.s.tration: REID"S CLOSE, CANONGATE]
After all these advertis.e.m.e.nts--the bishop"s secret coat of mail, the angry discussion between two Hamiltons in the very presence of Arran the head of the house, when he was himself willing to grant licence to Angus "to speak with the Queen"s Grace and thereafter depart out of the town"--and all the lesser evidences of danger and conspiracy, the Earl and his band prepared themselves for the worst. "This young lord haisted him to his armour, and caused his friends and servants to do the same, and went right peartlie to the gate, and stood above the Nether Bow in arrayed battle." The other party, when they were made aware that the Douglases were standing on their defence, came rushing together from kirk and market, hastily a.s.sembling without discipline or order, to find the little mail-clad line arranged in the strongest way against the background of the houses, where, no doubt, every shopkeeper had rushed to his bolts and bars, and every door clanged to in view of the sudden tumult. Sir Walter has given us in _The Abbot_ a glimpse more picturesque and graphic than any we can attempt, of the sudden scuffle in the street between two pa.s.sing groups, the armed attendants more dangerous and less prudent than their masters, whose strife as to which was to hold the centre of the street was enough to produce at once an encounter of arms ending in blood, and death for some of the band. The struggle known by the name of "Clear the Causeway" was more important, yet of a similar kind. Angus and his five hundred spears--in reality a much greater number since each spear was accompanied by certain men-at-arms--had much the advantage of the other party, hurriedly roused from their occupations, who had expected to make an easy end of the Douglases, thus betrayed into a sort of ambush in a hostile city, where no man would lift a hand to help them. But the tables were completely turned upon the Hamiltons and their supporters, when rushing "out of their lodging rudlie to the gait in ane furious rage," the peaceable driven forward by the taunts of the others, they found Angus and his spears in full array of battle. "When the Earl of Angus saw them coming, and perceaved Sir Patrick Hamilton foremost, and with him the Maister of Montgomerie, and saw them in sic ane furie, he knew well there was nothing but fighting, and cryed to his men to save Sir Patrick Hamilton if they might; but he came so far before the rest that he was slain hastilie, and with him the Maister of Montgomerie, with sundry other gentlemen, to the number of twelve score and twelve persons." The end of the fray, which was "foughten very hardilie on both sides ane long s.p.a.ce," was that Arran"s men were driven down the side of the hill through the narrow wynds that led from the High Street towards the wall, and thence made their way out through some postern, or perhaps at the gate near the Well-house Tower, where the little well of St. Margaret now bubbles up unconsidered, and so across the Nor" Loch, by boat or ford. Bishop Beatoun, he whose conscience clattered beneath his robes, fled again to the Blackfriars Church, where Mr. Gawin had found him on the previous evening prepared for mischief, and took refuge there behind the altar, where he was pursued and "his rockit rivin aff him, and had been slain," but that Gawin Douglas, following the pursuers, perhaps with a sarcastic satisfaction in setting forth the virtues of a peaceful robe over the warlike covering that invited as well as preserved from danger, interposed, saying, "It was shame to put hand on ane consecreat bishop." The encounter of these two priests by evening and morning, the supercilious refusal of the mail-clad bishop to interfere, and pretence of ignorance--and, as one may imagine, the watch over him from afar of his brother of Dunkeld with the full intention of peaceful yet effective reprisals, throw a light of grim humour upon the warlike scene. Maister Gawin had no mail-coat, and would not fight; but he must have kept an eye upon his natural foe through the fray, and it would be strange if he had not some pleasure in perceiving the rochet, which Beatoun must have donned hastily to save himself, pulled over his head by rude hands in scorn of the priestly pretence--and some satisfaction in interposing to preserve the "consecreat bishop," whose behaviour was so little saintly.
"Thereafter the Earl of Angus pa.s.sed to the castle and spoke with the Queen at his pleasure," says Pitscottie. It could not be a very gracious or affectionate interview. For Margaret and her husband had long before come to a complete breach, and the greatest desire in her mind was to divorce the young man whom she had married so hastily, who had treated her, indeed, with little consideration, and whom she had come to hate with a bitterness only possible to husbands and wives ill paired.
After this the young King pa.s.sed from hand to hand, from one guardian or captor to another, according to the custom of his predecessors, with many troubled vicissitudes in his life: but it is pleasant to believe that though the story leaves a painful impression as of a distracted childhood, continually dragged about and hara.s.sed between contending forces, yet that persistent placidity of nature which plants flowers upon the very edge of the fiercest precipices interposed to secure for little James as for other children the nursery calm, the infant happiness which is the right of childhood. No more delightful picture of tender infancy, the babbling of the first baby words, the sweet exigence and endless requirements of a child, was ever made than that which Sir David Lindsay, the future Lyon King, whom Sir Walter Scott in _gaiete de coeur_ (that he should ever be wrong!) introduces in full panoply of heraldic splendour before Flodden, but who was but a youth in the new James"s baby days, gives in his "Epistle to the King"s Grace,"
dedicatory to one of his poems. We will venture, though with compunction, once more as we have already done, to modernise the spelling as far as possible, so as to present no difficulty to the reader in the understanding of these delightful verses.
"When thou was young I bore thee in mine arme Full tenderlie till thou began to gang, And in thy bed oft happit thee full warme; With lute in hand then sweetly to thee sang.
Sometime in dancing wondrously I flang, And sometime playing farces on the floor, And sometime on mine office taking cure.
"And sometime like a fiend transfigurate, And sometime like the grisly ghost of Gye, In divers forms oft times disfigurate, And sometime dissagyist full pleasantly.
So since thy birth I have continually Been occupied and aye to thy pleasoure, And sometime Server, Coppon, and Carvoure."
In another poem he adds, upon the same subject, returning to the pleasant memory, the following happy description:--
"How, as a chapman bears his pack, I bore thy Grace upon my back, And sometime stridling on my neck, Dancing with many a bend and beck.
The first syllables that thou didst moote Was "_Pa, Da Lyn_" upon the lute.
And aye when thou camest from the school Then I behoved to play the fool."
"Play, Davy Lindsay:" the touch of nature brings the water to one"s eyes. Davy Lindsay had yet to play many a spring before King James, and some that were not gay. But the gentle stripling with the infant on his shoulder, the pertinacity of the little babbling cry, the "homely springs" played offhand that it was pity to hear, but which the lad enjoyed almost as much in laughing at their dashing incorrectness as the baby who knew only that it was a pleasant sound--how bright and vivid is the picture! Thus while the lords and his mother stormed over him, the little King, perhaps in those small state-rooms in well-defended Edinburgh, perhaps in the sunshine at Holyrood with his poet, had pleasant days.
James was already a growing boy when the last and worst of the tyrannies which oppressed his youth began. When the disastrous episode of Albany was well over the Douglases again made one last desperate struggle for the supreme power. Angus it would seem was not discouraged by the change in the Queen from love to hate, nor even by the efforts which she had begun to make to divorce and shake him off, and it is evident that he must have secured the liking of the little King, to whom in the close intimacy of the family as his mother"s husband he must have been known from earliest childhood. The Earl was handsome and young, one of the finest cavaliers of the Court, and probably was kind to the infant who could not contradict or cross him, and whose favour it was so expedient to secure. It costs a young man little to make himself adored by a boy to whom he seems the incarnation of manly strength and splendour. And there is every appearance that James accepted Angus"s rule at first with pleasure, no doubt looking up to him as a guide in the manly exercises which could be pursued in his following with more spirit and zeal than in the Queen"s surroundings. The great power of the Douglases, which it took so much bloodshed to break down, and which James II had spent all his life in contending with, extinguished in one branch of the family, seemed now to have developed in another with increased and extended force. Angus was as great, as potent, as universally feared as the Earls of Douglas had ever been; and almost as lawless, filling the country with his exactions and those of his dependants. He had attained this triumph after many drawbacks and downfalls and against the strongest opponents, and Scotland was overawed by the terror of that well-known name. It was scarcely to be supposed, however, that the young King, precociously aware of all the dangers of his position, could remain subject willingly as he grew up to the sway of a va.s.sal of the Crown however great. There must have been private counsellors ever ready to whisper that Douglas was nothing save by the King"s authority, and that James"s favour alone could keep him in his usurped place. A few months after he had attained the age of sixteen, the boy over whom everybody had intrigued and plotted all his life long, who had been torn from one side to another since ever he could remember, and whom a Douglas had but recently threatened, at a moment of alarm, that rather than render him up they would tear him in two, took at last the matter into his own hands. Whether the suggestion was his own, or had in some way been breathed into his mind, there is no evidence; but it is clear that he had good reason to be very tired of his subjection. He had already attempted, we are told, several means of getting free of bondage, but had only succeeded in causing the destruction of various lords to whom he had appealed. All his friends had been alienated from him. His mother was powerless to help, and indeed on her own account in such evil case that she is said to have wandered over the country in disguise, friendless and out of favour with all. She had hastened into a third foolish marriage as soon as she had obtained her divorce from Angus, and thus lost all her supporters and champions. His uncle, Henry VIII, was more closely bound to Angus, who was strongly in the interest of England as against France, than to any other Scot, and the young King was thus surrounded by influences hostile to his freedom.
[Ill.u.s.tration: DOORWAY, SIR A. AITCHESON"S HOUSE]
There are moments, however, when the most vigilant watch relaxes, and it so happened that Angus left his young prisoner on one occasion at the Castle of Falkland, the hunting seat of the Scots kings, to all appearance fully occupied with hunting and hawking and thinking of nothing more important, in the charge of Archibald Douglas, the Earl"s uncle, George his brother, and a certain James Douglas of Parkhead, who was the captain of the guard. When Angus had been gone a day or two, the elder of these guardians asked leave of the King, according to the formula, to go to Dundee upon personal business of his own; and George Douglas rode off to St. Andrews to see the Bishop on a question of taxes, leaving only the captain and his hundred guardsmen to be accounted for. Who can doubt that young James was well used to all devices for deceiving his gaolers, he who had been held by so many?
There was nothing in his present expedient which could have offended the most tender conscience. He desired that preparations might be made for a great hunting, calling upon "the laird of Ferme, forester of the park of Falkland, and chamberlain of Fife," to warn everybody about and call all the surrounding gentlemen "that had speedie dogs" to hunt with him, appointing the meeting next morning at seven o"clock, "for he was determined to slay ane deare or two for his pleasure." Pitscottie is very particular in his description, and places the economy of the little castle before us, among its woods--with its simplicity, its precautions, the homeliness of the household. The King desired to have "his disjeuner" at four in the morning, and bade James Douglas "gang the sooner to his bed that night that he might rise the sooner in the morning," and after he had supped, called for a drink and drank to Douglas, saying that they should see good hunting on the morn, and warning him not to be late; from which it may be guessed that Captain James was not fond of early hours. The captain saw as he thought the King go to bed, and having set the watch, and arranged everything for the night, went to bed himself, as the boy had laughingly bidden him to do. As soon as all was quiet, eluding the watch without apparent difficulty, the King, attended only by "Jockie Hart, a yeoman of the stable," and another "secret servant," escaped in the stillness of the night into the freedom of the sleeping country. It is said by one authority to have been in June that this evasion was made, but in June there is scarcely any night at all in Scotland, and the brief darkness could scarcely have served as a screen for the fugitives; probably it was earlier in the year, when the night was more to be calculated upon.
One can imagine the breathless excitement and delight of the long ride, with the fresh breeze in his face, and one of the richest valleys in Scotland coming softly into sight in the midst of the morning, as the young King full of spirit, ambition, and all the rising impulses of manhood, left behind him the gentle shadow of the Lomond hills, and swept round the base of the Ochils towards the castle, high-standing on its rock, where freedom and his crown and all the privileges of royal life and independence were awaiting him. He reached Stirling in the breaking of the day, and galloping across the bridge, caused its gates to be closed after him, that no pursuer might cross the river; and was received with great rejoicing in the castle, where everything had been prepared for his coming, and where the captain, having let down the portcullis and made all secure, "laid the King in his bed, because he had ridden all that night." Probably there was no moment in the life of the young monarch, who had fallen upon such troubled times, more sweet than this when, after the wild excitement of the long night"s riding, he closed his young eyes, at an hour so unaccustomed, in the clear radiance of the morning, feeling his life now free before him, as light and fair and unfettered as the rising day. But Pitscottie must continue the tale in his own admirable way. He says:--
"We will lat him sleep in his bed, and return to George Douglas, who came home to Falkland at eleven hours at night, and required at the porters what the King was doing, who answered that he was in his own chamber sleeping, who was to rise tymous to the hunting, and right so said the watchmen. George hearing this went to his bed, till on the morn that the sun rose. Then came Patrick Carmichael, baillie of Abernethie, and knocked at George Douglas"s chamber door, and inquired of him what the King was doing. George answered that he was not waked as yet in his own chamber. The baillie answered, "Ye are deceaved; he is along the bridge of Stirling this night." Then George Douglas gat up hastilie and went to the porters and watchmen and inquired for the King, who still answered that he was sleeping in his own chamber. Then George Douglas came to the King"s chamber door and found it locked, and dang it up, but found no man in it.
Then he cryed, "Fye, treason, the King is gone!""
The confusion and dismay of the household were great. Some said that the King had gone to Bambriefe "to visit a gentlewoman," which explanation was received with relief, the question of morality being of small consequence in comparison. George Douglas immediately leaped on his horse to ascertain if this were true, but had not ridden more than two miles when he met the Earl of Rothes, who told him the King was not there. By this time the other Douglas who had gone to Dundee had returned also, and a hurried council was held what to do. Angus himself was immediately summoned from Tantallon by an express, "ane haistie post," and instantly answering, set out with his uncle and brother, and rode to Stirling with some forlorn hope it would appear of recovering their empire over the King. But James had already gathered counsellors round him, and was himself too strongly determined to maintain his liberty to allow any approach. The road to Stirling would no doubt be full of scouts, to give warning of what the discomfited but powerful family meant to do, and as soon as their approach was known a herald was sent to the town cross to proclaim by sound of trumpet a royal decree that neither Angus nor his companions should approach within six miles of where the King was under pain of death. It is curious to mark how in a moment the great power of the Douglases and their high courage collapsed in face of this proclamation. They paused on their hasty ride, and held another hasty council, and though some among them were for pressing forward and seizing once more the malapert boy who defied them, the Earl himself and his brother decided to obey the proclamation and withdraw. They fell back upon Linlithgow, where they paused a day or two hoping perhaps for better news. But by this time the other n.o.bles were crowding round the King. Huntly, Argyle, Athole, Glencairn, Monteith, and Rothes, with a still larger company of barons, hastened to Stirling to protect and aid with their counsel the liberated prince. Archbishop Beatoun, the wily Churchman, who had done all he could to overthrow Angus,--who had been for a moment so worsted in the conflict that he skulked about his own Fife moors in the disguise of a shepherd, but who had lately made friends with the dominant family and entertained the King and his guardians together, calling them "to his pasche (Easter) at St. Andrews,"--and who had no doubt known of the momentous night journey, and probably detained George Douglas late that evening to make it more sure, had also joined the King.
With this powerful escort James proceeded to Edinburgh, where for some time the lords around him kept watch night and day, keeping their little army of attendants under arms in case of any attack on the part of Angus. One night, we are told, James himself in full armour took the command of the guard, more probably, however, from a boyish desire to feel himself at the head of his defenders than for any other reason; and even his bedchamber was shared, after an unpleasant fashion of the time, by the b.a.s.t.a.r.d of Arran, "James Hamilton, that b.l.o.o.d.y butcherer," as Pitscottie calls him, who had precipitated the fray of "Clear the Causeway" and was Angus"s most inveterate enemy. These extraordinary precautions, however, seem to have been unnecessary. The Douglases would appear to have accepted their defeat as complete, and to have been entirely cowed by it. Another proclamation was put forth on the arrival of the King in Edinburgh commanding all true subjects to refrain from intercourse of any kind with Angus, his brother, and uncle, not to receive them or succour them or hold any communication with them on peril of being considered sharers in their crime--in short, a sort of interdict after the papal fashion. The impromptu council sat for two days in the upper chamber of the Tolbooth, which was the recognised Parliament House, chiefly, it would seem, to hear the King"s indictment against the family of Douglas. James set forth all his grievances, his subjection to the will of Angus, his separation from his own friends, the appearance he had been made to a.s.sume of enmity to his real champions, and vowed at the end, says Pitscottie, in the fervour of his indignation and resentment, that Scotland should not hold them both. He would receive nothing but support in that a.s.sembly where all had suffered from the supremacy of Angus, and where the too powerful race had no friends. The council appointed anew all the high officers of State, whose posts had been appropriated by the Douglases, and sent an envoy to England to announce that the government of Scotland was henceforward in the King"s own hands. It was also ordained that a Parliament should be called in the month of September, to confirm in a more decorous and regular way the decisions of the present hasty a.s.sembly.
When Parliament met these questions were accordingly discussed over again, with confirmation of what had been already done. It was decided that Angus should be summoned before them to answer for his misdeeds, under the penalty if he did not appear of being "put to the horn and banished during the King"s will." Angus was not so rash as to trust himself within the power of his enemies, as his kinsmen of the house of Douglas had already done on two fatal occasions: and as neither he nor his retainers put in an appearance, they were accordingly attainted, their lands forfeited to the Crown, their name put under the public ban, their great castle of Tantallon seized, and themselves proclaimed through all the country as traitors whom no man should receive or succour.
The complete downfall which overtook this great house after the young King"s abandonment of it is very remarkable, and shows how important was the royal position, notwithstanding the manner in which it had been _exploite_, and the mere nominal power of its actual possessor. The house of Angus crumbled into the dust as soon as their young prisoner escaped their hands. They took refuge in England, where they vainly attempted on various occasions to negotiate for their return, but with no success. The name continued obnoxious to James during his whole life.
Sir Walter has done his best to rehabilitate that name in the n.o.ble Douglas of _The Lady of the Lake_, who has been identified with Archibald of Kilspindie, "the uncle of the banished Earl," the story of whose appearance at the games at Stirling is said to have some foundation of reality. But the historians of the house, who alone mention this, state the facts in a very different way.
Thus the Angus branch of the Douglas family fell, as the Earls of Douglas had fallen, and for a generation there was little heard of it save in mutterings of treason in moments of difficulty, which never came to much--until in the following reign the indomitable race rose again in another branch and under another name, and furnished in the Regent Morton one of the strongest as well as the most questionable figures of a deeply disturbed time. Never was a race more difficult to subdue.
The escape of James from Falkland took place between Easter and June in the year 1527. In 1528, the Douglases being clean swept out of the country, the young King went on a professed hunting expedition to the Borders, where, besides innumerable deer, its ostensible reason, his ride through the southern district carried punishment and death to many a Border reiver and especially to the famous John or Johnnie Armstrong, the Laird of Kilnokie, and chief or at least best-known representative of his name. Whether it was wise policy to hang the reiver who was the terror of the Borders, yet "never molested no Scottis man," it is not necessary to decide. He was a scourge to the English, of whom it was said that there was none from the Scottish Border to Newcastle who did not "pay ane tribute to be free of his c.u.mber." Johnnie Armstrong had the folly to come into the King"s presence with such a train, his men so completely armed and so many in number, as to compete with royal magnificence, not very great in Scotland in those days. "What wants yon knave that a king should have?" said the young James, who had certainly had enough of such powerful subjects: and he would not listen to either excuse or explanation from the Borderer, whose defiance as he was led to his execution, and the wail of his wild followers after him, sounds still in the stirring strains of song and ballad. No doubt it was justice that James did--but justice somewhat stern and out of time.
The young Court now blazing out into full splendour, with a legitimate head and every prospect of prosperity, became again the resort of foreign chivalry and magnificent envoys, among them a legate from the Pope to a.s.sure the allegiance of James to the Holy See, which his uncle of England had deserted. Henry at the same time did not neglect by constant messengers and vague promises, now of the hand of the Princess Mary, now of an English dukedom, to secure his nephew to his side. After that princess, whom her father tried his utmost to put out of the succession by divorcing her mother, James was the next heir, and Henry did not forget that possibility. The hand of the young princess had already been several times offered to the Scots King without any certainty either in the proposal or its acceptance. One cannot help wondering what might have been the issue had that unhappy Mary, to whom history has given so grim a nickname, been thus wedded in early youth to a gracious and gallant Stewart. In all history there occurs by times a gleam like this of possible deliverance from fate, an opening by which the subjects of tragedy might have secured an escape had they but known.
One wonders had she thus escaped the wrongs and bitterness of her early career whether Mary would have got free from those traces of blood and madness which have left so dark a shadow upon her name; or whether, in the conflict that was to follow, her fierce Tudor pa.s.sion would have embittered every strife. It is wonderful to think that she might have been the mother of that other Mary so different yet still more sadly fated, who in that case never could have been the Mary Stewart she was.
We are led to something like a _reductio ad absurdum_ by such speculations, very vain yet always attractive as they are. James was eager to marry at the earliest possible moment, and all would have welcomed the marriage with his kinswoman.
In this respect, however, as in almost every other, Scotland was now at a turning-point of the utmost importance in her career. For the first time her politics had begun to be troubled by the possibility of an alliance with England more strong and lasting than the brief periods of truce which had hitherto existed between two nations whose principle and tradition were those of enmity. A perpetual peace had indeed been sworn and signed at the time of the marriage of Margaret Tudor with James IV, but how little lasting that had been is amply demonstrated by the fact that no such crushing defeat had ever been inflicted upon Scotland as that of Flodden, in which the King and the great part of his n.o.bles perished. Perhaps it was the germ of the design to attract the lesser country into the arms of the greater by friendship rather than to set her desperately at bay against all peaceful influences, which had prevented the successful army from taking advantage of the victory; but certainly through all the distracted period of James"s minority efforts had been made by constant envoys to acquire a share in the councils of the country, such as had hitherto been considered the right of France, who was the old and faithful ally as England was "the auld enemy" of the Scots. The alliance with France had been taken for granted on all sides.
That Scotland should hara.s.s England in every war between that country and her continental neighbour was a foregone conclusion, and it was something still more sure, a proverb on the English side, that when France was to be a.s.sailed the right thing was to begin with Scotland.
The position of Henry as brother of the Scottish Queen, and the nearest relative of James, who, under circ.u.mstances not at all unlikely to occur, might be his heir, gave the English king now a natural right to interfere; and it is conceivable that had this right been exercised more wisely it might have led to fortunate issues. But unhappily King Henry had a.s.sociated his influence with that of Angus, taking the part of his sister"s discarded husband with great determination, and apparently without any sympathy in those changes in Margaret"s affections which so much resembled his own. Angus was to Scotland the representative of the English alliance, and as everything connected with Angus had now become hateful to James, it followed that his uncle"s desire to obtain an influence over him, which was not accompanied by any substantial marks of kindness towards himself, did not meet with much success: though it might have been otherwise had the vaguely-proposed marriage been carried out. But one can scarcely be sorry that the n.o.ble and graceful James should have escaped such an alliance.
[Ill.u.s.tration: LINLITHGOW PALACE]
Other and still more serious matters were now, however, surging upwards in both England and Scotland, which doubled the silent struggle between the old ally and the new. On the side of France was the old religion, the Church which at this period was the strongest of the Estates of Scotland, richer than any of the others, and possessing almost all the political ability of the time: on the side of England a new, scarcely recognised, but powerful influence, which was soon to attain almost complete mastery in Scotland and shatter that Church to pieces. In the beginning of James"s reign this new power was but beginning to swell in the silent bosom of the country, showing here and there in a trial for heresy and in the startling fires of execution which cut off the first martyrs for the reformed faith. But there is no evidence to show that James, a young man full of affairs much more absorbing than religious controversy, with more confidence, politically at least, in the Church than in any other power of his realm, had ever been awakened to the importance of the struggle. The smoke of those fires which blew over all Scotland in potent fumes from St. Andrews, on the further side of the Firth; and from Edinburgh, where on the Castle Hill in the intervals of the tiltings and tourneys, the Vicar of Dollar for example, of whose examination we have a most vivid and admirable report, full of picturesque simplicity, not without humour even in the midst of the tragedy, was burnt--along with several gentlemen of his county: does not seem to have reached the young King, absorbed in some project of State, or busy with new laws and regulations, or inspecting the portraits of the great ladies among whom he had to choose his bride. There is a curious story communicated in a letter of one of the English envoys of the period of his conversation with a Scotch gentleman, in which we find a description of James listening to a play represented before the Court at the feast of the Epiphany, 1540, in the Castle of Linlithgow. This play is believed to have been Sir David Lindsay"s _Satire on the Three Estates_, one of the most effective attacks upon the corruptions of the Church which had ever been made, and setting forth the exactions of the priests from the peasantry and the poor at every event of their lives, as well as the wealth and wickedness of the monastic communities, of which Scotland was full, and which had long been the recognised object of popular satire and objurgation. The performance would seem to have had as great an effect upon the young King as had the play in _Hamlet_ upon the majesty of Denmark. James turned to Beatoun (the Cardinal, nephew and successor of Archbishop James) the Chancellor in indignant remonstrance. Were these things so? and if they were, would not the bishops and other powerful ecclesiastics join to repress them? Let them do so at once, cried the sovereign: or if not he should send half a dozen of the proudest of them to King Henry to be dealt with after his methods. Even Churchmen had occasionally to brook such threats from an excited prince. Beatoun answered with courtier-like submission that a word from the King was enough, upon which James, not wont to confine himself to words, and strong in the success with which he had overcome one of his Estates, the lords, now so quiet under his hand, replied that he would not spare many words for such an issue. This characteristic scene is very interesting. But probably when the memory of what he had heard faded from the busy King, and the tumult of public events gained possession again of his ear and mind, he forgot the sudden impression, or contented himself with the thought that Beatoun and the bishops must put order in their own affairs. Pitscottie tells us in respect to a projected visit to England, vaguely thought of and planned several years before this time, that "the wicked bishops of Scotland would not thole"
a meeting between James and Henry. "For the bishops feared that if the King had met with King Henry that he would have moved him to casten down the abbeys, and to have altered the religion as the King of England had done before. Therefore the bishops bade him to bide at home, and gave him three thousand pounds of yearly rent out of their benefices." It is to be feared that history has no evidence of this voluntary munificence, but James found the ecclesiastical possessions in Scotland very useful for the purposes of taxation, and in this respect did not permit Beatoun to have his own way.
When the young King was in his twenty-fourth year he found himself able--many previous negotiations on the subject having come to nothing--to pay a visit to the Continent in his own person in order to secure a wife. It is a greater testimony to the personal power and vigour of James than any mere details could give that, within eight years of the time when, a boy of sixteen, he had escaped from the power of the Douglas, it should be possible for him to leave, after all the wild anarchy of his minority, a pacificated and orderly kingdom behind him, in the care of a Council of Regency, while he went forth upon a mission so important to himself. He had altogether extinguished and expelled the house of Douglas; he had subdued and repressed other turbulent lords, and convinced them that his authority was neither to be neutralised nor made light of; he had settled and calmed the Border by the most decisive means; and he was now free to show himself in the society of kings, and win his princess, and see the world. He had been already the object of many overtures from contemporary Powers. The Emperor and the Pope had both sent him envoys and conciliated his friendship; and in the imperial house itself as well as in many others of the highest rank there had been ladies proposed to share his crown.
The one more immediately in view when he set out on his journey was a daughter of the Duke of Vendome. The defeat of Charles V before Ma.r.s.eilles took place almost simultaneously with James"s arrival, and the Scotch chroniclers do not lose the opportunity of a.s.serting that it was the coming of the King of the Scots with a supposed army of twenty thousand men to the succour of France which was the reason of the Emperor"s precipitate withdrawal. Pitscottie narrates, with more evident truthfulness, how the Frenchmen on the Norman coast were alarmed by the ships, fearing it to be an enemy which hove in sight, "for there were many strangers in his companie, so that he appeared ane great army." But the sight of the red lion of Scotland changed their alarms into joy, and they welcomed the Scots King and party, "at the New Haven beside Diep,"
with much rejoicing. He would seem to have pushed across France to the Court of Vendome without pausing to pay his respects to the King at Paris; and we find his movements recorded in a romantic tale, which is neither contradicted nor supported by other authorities, but likely enough to a romantic young prince upon a love-quest. According to this description James did not a.s.sume his proper character but appeared only as one among the many knights, who probably represented themselves, to make his feint successful, as merely a party of cavaliers seeking adventure and the exercises of chivalry. He intended thus to see, while himself unknown, "the gentlewoman who sould have been his spouse, thinking to spy her pulchritud and behaviour unkenned by her."
"Notwithstanding this fair ladie took suspition that the King of Scotland should be in the companie, wherefore she pa.s.sed to her coffer and took out his picture, which she had gotten out of Scotland by ane secret moyane, and as soon as she looked to the picture it made her know the King of Scotland incontinent where he stood among the rest of his companie, and past peartlie to him, and took him by the hand, and said, "Sir, ye stand over far aside; therefore, if it please your Grace, you may show yourself to my father or me, and confer and pa.s.s the time ane while.""
Perhaps it was injudicious of the fair ladie to be so "peart." At all events, after much feasting, "nothing but merriness and banquetting and great cheer and lovelie communing betwixt the King"s grace and the fair ladies, with great musick and playing on instruments, and all other kinds of pastime for the fields," as well as "jousting and running of great horses," the ungrateful James "thought it expedient to speak nothing of marriage at that time, till he had spoken with the King of France, considering," adds the chronicler, who perhaps sees an excuse to be necessary, "he was within his realm he would show him his mind and have his counsel thereto before he concluded the matter." Pitscottie thus saves the feelings of the lady of whom other historians say curtly that she did not please the King. But when the Scottish band reached the Court, though it was then in mourning for the Dauphin, recently dead, King James was received with open arms. The King of France, sick and sad for the loss of his son, was in the country at a hunting seat, and when James was suddenly introduced at the door of his chamber as "the King of Scotland, sire, come to comfort you," the arrival evidently made the best possible impression. The sorrowful father declared, as he embraced the young stranger, that it was as if another son had been given him from heaven; and after a little interval the royal party, increased by James"s Scottish train, moved on to another palace. We may be allowed to imagine that the Queen and her ladies came out to meet them, as the first sight which James appears to have had of his future bride was while she was "ryding in ane chariot, because she was sickly, and might not ryd upon hors." Magdalen, too, saw him as he rode to meet the fair cavalcade in her father"s company, who looked so much happier and brighter from the encounter with this gallant young prince. The poor girl was already stricken for death, and had but a few months to live; but it is very likely that her malady was that fatal but deceitful one which leaves a more delicate beauty to its victims, and gives feverish brightness to the eyes and colour to the cheek. A tender creature, full of poetry and imagination, and most likely all unconscious of the fate that hung over her, she loved the gallant cavalier from the first moment of seeing him, and touched the heart of James by that fragile beauty and by the affection that shone in her soft eyes. It was a marriage that no one approved, for her days were known to be numbered. But perhaps some faint hope that happiness, that potent physician, might arrest disease, as it has been known to do, prevailed both with the anxious father and the young man beloved, in whom tender pity and grat.i.tude replaced a warmer sentiment. At all events the marriage took place in Paris, in the n.o.ble church of Notre Dame, in the beginning of the year 1537. The King, we are told, sent to Scotland to invite a number of other n.o.blemen and gentlemen to attend his wedding, which was performed with the greatest pomp and splendour. Not until May did the young couple set out for their home, and then they were laden with gifts, two ships being presented to them, a number of splendid horses fully caparisoned, and quant.i.ties of valuable tapestries, cloth of silver and gold, and jewels of every description. Perhaps the long delay was intended to make the journey more safe for the poor young Queen. The voyage from Dieppe to Leith lasted five days, and the bridal party was accompanied by an escort of "fiftie ships of Scottismen, Frenchmen, and strangers." "When the Queen was come upon Scottis eard, she bowed her down to the same, and kissed the mould thereof, and thanked G.o.d that her husband and she were come safe through the seas." There could not be a more tender or attractive picture. How full of poetry and soft pa.s.sion must the gentle creature have been who thus took possession of the land beloved for her young husband"s sake! The Scottish eard indeed was all that she was to have of that inheritance, for in little more than a month the gentle Magdalen was dead. She was laid in the chapel of the palace which was to have been her home, with "ane dolorous lamentation; for triumph and merriness were all turned into dirges and soul-ma.s.ses, which were very lamentable to behold."
This sad story is crowned by Pitscottie with a brief note of the death of the Duc de Vendome"s daughter, "who took sick displeasure at the King of Scotland"s marriage that she deceased immediately thereafter; whereat the King of Scotland was highly displeased, thinking that he was the occasion of that gentlewoman"s death." Other historians say that this tragical conclusion did not occur, but that the Princess of Vendome was married on the same day as James. Pitscottie"s is the more romantic ending, and rounds the pathetic tale.
After such a mournful and ineffectual attempt at married life all the negotiations had to be begun over again, and James was at last married, to the general satisfaction, to Mary of Guise, a woman, as it turned out, of many fine and n.o.ble qualities, to which but indifferent justice was ever done. It was before this event, however, and immediately after the death of the Queen, that a curious and tragical incident happened, which furnished another strange scene to the many a.s.sociations of Edinburgh. This was the execution of Lady Glamis upon the Castle Hill for witchcraft and secret attempts upon the life of the King by means of magic or of poison. No one seems to know what these attempts were.
Pitscottie gives this extraordinary event a short paragraph. The grave Pinkerton fills a page or two with an apology or defence of James for permitting such an act. But we are not told what was the evidence, or how the sovereign"s life was threatened. The supposed culprit was however--and the fact is significant--the only member of the family of Angus left in Scotland, the sister of the Earl. Once more the Castle Hill was covered with an awed or excited crowd, not unaccustomed to that sight, for the heretics had burnt there not long before, but at once more and less moved than usual, for the victim was a woman fair and dignified, such a sufferer as always calls forth the pity of the spectators, but her crime witchcraft, a thing held in universal horror, and with which there would be no sympathisers. Few, if any, in that crowd would be so advanced in sentiment as to regard the cruel exhibition with the horrified contempt of modern times. The throng that lined that great platform would have no doubt that it was right to burn a witch wherever she was found; and the beauty of the woman and the grandeur of her race would give a pang the more of painful satisfaction in her destruction. But it is strange that thus a last blow should have been aimed at that family, once so great and strong, which James"s resentment had pursued to the end. A little while before, Archibald Douglas of Kilspindie had thrown himself upon James"s mercy--the only member of the Douglas family who can be in any way identified with the n.o.ble Douglas of _The Lady of the Lake_.
""Tis James of Douglas, by St. Serle, The uncle of the banished Earl."
But Archibald of Kilspindie did not meet the same forgiveness with which his prototype in the poem was received. He was sent back into banishment unforgiven, the King"s word having been pa.s.sed to forgive no one condemned by the law. Perhaps the same stern fidelity to a stern promise was the reason why Lady Glamis was allowed to go to the stake unrescued.
But we speculate in vain on subjects so veiled in ignorance and uncertainty. Perhaps his counsellors acted on their own authority in respect to a crime the reprobation and horror of which were universal, and did not disturb the King in the first shock of his mourning. In the same week the fair and fragile Magdalen of France was carried to her burial, and Lady Glamis was burned at the other extremity of Edinburgh.
Perhaps it was supposed that something in the incantations of the one had a fatal influence upon the young existence of the other. At all events these two sensations fell to the populace of Edinburgh and all the strangers who were constantly pa.s.sing through her gates, at the same time. Life in those days was full of pictorial circ.u.mstances which do not belong to ours. One is inclined to wonder sometimes whether the many additional comforts we possess make up for that perpetual movement in the air, the excitement, the communication of new ideas, the strange sights both pleasant and terrible. The burning of a witch or a heretic is perhaps too tremendous a sensation to be desired by the most heroic spectator; but the perpetual drama going on thus before the eyes of all the world, and giving to the poorest an absolute share in every new and strange thing, must have added a reality to national life which no newspapers can give. That the people remain always eager for this share in historical events, the crowds that never weary of gazing at pa.s.sing princes, the innumerable audience of the picture papers, the endless reproduction of every insignificant public event, from a procession of aldermen to the simplest day"s journey of a royal personage, abundantly testify. In the days of the Jameses few of the crowd could read, and still fewer had the chance of reading. A ballad flying from voice to voice across the country, sung at the ingle-neuk, repeated from one to another in the little crowd at a "stairhead," in which the grossest humorous view was the best adapted for the people, represented popular literature. But most things that went on were visible to the crowding population. They saw the foreign visitors, the amba.s.sadors, the knights, each with his distinguishable crest, who came to meet in encounter of arms the knights of the Scottish Court. All that went on they had their share in, and a kind of acquaintance with every notability. The public events were a species of large emblazoned history which he who ran could read.
These ballads above referred to came to singular note, however, in one of the many discussions between England and Scotland which were carried on by means of the frequent envoys sent to James from his uncle. The Borders, it appears, were full of this flying literature sent forth by unknown writers, and spread probably by, here and there, a wandering friar, more glad of a merry rhyme than disconcerted by a satire against his own cloth, or with still more relish dispersing over the countryside reports of King Henry"s amours and divorces, and of the plundering of abbeys and profane a.s.sumption of sacred rights by a monarch who was so far from sanctified. Popular prophecies of how a new believing king should be raised up to disconcert the heretics, and on the northern side of the Border of the speedy elevation of James to the throne of England, and final victorious triumph of the Scottish side, flew from village to village, exciting at last the alarm of Henry and his council, who made formal complaint of them at the Scottish Court, drawing from James a promise that if any of his subjects should be found to be the authors of such productions they should suffer death for it--a heavy penalty for literary transgression. In Scotland farther north it was another kind of ballad which was said and sung, or whispered under the breath with many a peal of rude laughter, the Satires of "Davy Lindsay" and many a lesser poet--ludicrous stories of erring priests and friars, indecent but humorous, with lamentable tales of dues exacted and widows robbed, and all the sins of the Church, the proud bishop and his lemans, the avaricious priest and his exactions, the confessors who bullied a dying penitent into gifts which injured his family, and all the well-worn scandals by which in every time of reformation the coa.r.s.er imagination of the populace is stirred. If James himself was startled into an angry demand how such things could be after he had witnessed the performance of David Lindsay"s play, which was trimmed into comparative decency for courtly ears, it may be supposed what was the effect of that and still broader a.s.saults, upon the unchastened imagination of the people. The Reformation progressed by great strides by such rude yet able help as well as by the purer methods of religion. The priests, however, do not seem to have made war on the balladmakers, as the great King of England would have had his nephew do. Buchanan, indeed, whose cla.s.sic weapons had been brought into this literary crusade, and who also had his fling at the Franciscans as well as his coa.r.s.er and more popular brethren, was imprisoned for a time, and had to withdraw from his country, but the poets of the people, far more effective, would seem to have escaped.
All this, however, probably seemed of but little importance to James in comparison with the greater affairs of the kingdom of which his hands were full. When the episode of his marriages was over, and still more important an heir secured, he returned to that imperial track in which he had acquitted himself so well. All would seem to have been in order in the centre of the kingdom; the Borders were as quiet as it was possible for the Borders to be; and only the remote Highlands and islands remained still insubordinate, in merely nominal subjection to the laws of the kingdom. James, we are told, had long intended to make one of the royal raids so familiar to Scottish history among his doubtful subjects of these parts, and accordingly an expedition was very carefully prepared, twelve ships equipped both for comfort and for war, with every device known to the time for provisioning them and keeping them in full efficiency. We are told that the English authorities looking on, were exceedingly suspicious of this voyage, not knowing whither such preparations might tend, while all Scotland watched the setting out of the expedition almost as much in the dark as to its motive, and full of wonder as to where the King could be going. Bonfires were blazing on all the hilltops in rejoicing for the birth of a prince when James took his way with his fleet down the Firth. Pinkerton, who ought to have known better, talks of "the acclamations of numerous spectators on the adjacent hills and sh.o.r.es" as if the great estuary had been a little river. It might well be that both in Fife and Lothian there were eager lookers-on, as soon as it was seen that the fleet was in motion, to see the ships pa.s.s: but their acclaims must have been loud indeed to carry from Leith to Kinghorn. The King sailed early in June 1540 towards the north. Many a yacht and pleasure ship still follows the same route round the Scottish coast towards the wild attractions of the islands.
"Merrily, merrily, bounds the bark, She bounds before the gale, The mountain breeze from Ben-na-darch Is joyous in her sail.
With fluttering sound like laughter hoa.r.s.e The cords and canvas strain, The waves divided by her force In rippling eddies chased her course As if they laughed again."
But it was on no pleasure voyage that James had set out. He had in his twelve ships two thousand armed men, led by the most trusted lords of Scotland, and his mission was to reduce to order the clans who knew so little what a king"s dignity was, or the restraints of law, or the pursuits of industry. No stand would seem to have been anywhere made against him. Many of the chiefs of the more turbulent tribes were brought off to the ships, not so much as prisoners in consequence of their own misdoings, but as hostages for their clans: and the startled isles, overawed by the sight of the King and his great ships, and by the more generous motive of anxiety for their own chieftains in pledge for them, calmed down out of their wild ways, and ceased from troubling in a manner unprecedented in their turbulent history.
An incidental consequence of this voyage sounds oddly modern, as if it might have been a transcript from the most recent records. James perceived, or more probably had his attention directed to the fact, that the fishermen of the north were much molested by fishing vessels from Holland, Flanders, and the Scandinavian coasts, who interfered with their fishing, sometimes even thrusting them by violence of arms out of their own waters. The King accordingly detached one or two of his vessels under the command of Maxwell, his admiral, to inquire into these high-handed proceedings, with the result that one of the foreign fisher pirate-ships was seized and brought to Leith to answer for their misdoings. There they were reprimanded and bound over to better behaviour, then dismissed without further penalty. How little effectual, however, this treatment was, is exemplified by the fact that the selfsame offence continues to be repeated until this very day.
There would seem to have been a little pause of calm and comfort in James"s life after this victorious expedition. Clouds already bigger than a man"s hand were forming on his horizon; the country had begun to be agitated throughout its depths with the rising forces of the reform, and the priests who had always surrounded James were hurrying on in the truculence of terror to sterner and sterner enactments against heretics: while he, probably even yet but moderately interested, thinking of other things, and though adding to the new laws which he was persuaded to originate in this sense, conditions to the effect that corresponding reforms were to be wrought in the behaviour of the priesthood,--had not entered at all into the fierce current of theological strife. He followed the faith in which he had been bred, revolted rather than attracted by the proceedings and pretensions of his uncle of England, willing that the bishops, who probably knew best, and who were, as he complained to the English amba.s.sador, the only men of sense and ability near him, should have their own way in their own concerns; but for himself much more intent on the temporal welfare of his kingdom than on its belief, or the waves of opinion which might blow over it. He had just been very successful in what no doubt seemed to him an enterprise much more kingly and important--the subjugation of the islands. He was happy and prosperous in his private life, his Queen having performed the high duty expected of her in providing the kingdom with an heir, indeed with two sons, to make, as appeared, a.s.surance doubly sure; and though the burning of a heretic was not a pleasant circ.u.mstance, Beatoun and the rest of the brotherhood were too clever and helpful as men of the world to be easily dispensed with. James had, there can be no doubt, much reason to be discontented and dissatisfied, as almost all his predecessors had been, with the n.o.bility of his kingdom. Apart from some of those young companions-in-arms who were delightful in the camp and field but useless in the council chamber, his state of mind would seem to have resembled more the modern mood which is represented by the word "bored" than any other more dignified expression. The priests might be fierce (as indeed were the lords, still more) but they were able, and knew something of the necessities of government. The barons disgusted him with their petty jealousies, their want of instruction, their incapacity for any broad or statesmanlike view, and there would seem little doubt that he dispensed with their services as much as possible, and turned to those persons who comprehended him with a natural movement which unfortunately, however, is never fortunate in a king. Something of the severance between himself and those who were nearest to him in rank, which had ruined his grandfather, showed itself as he advanced towards the gravity of manhood: and the fatal name of favourite began to be attached to one man at least in the Court, who would seem to have understood better than the others the ways and intentions of James. But in the meantime the clouds were only gathering; the darkness had not begun. A year or two before, the King had given to the legal faculty of Scotland a form and const.i.tution which it has retained to this day. He had inst.i.tuted the Court of Session, the "Feifteen," the law lords in their grave if short-lived dignity. He had begun to build and repair and decorate at Holyrood and Linlithgow. "He sent to Denmark," says Pitscottie, "and brought home great horss and meares and put them in parks that their offspring might be gotten to sustein the warres when need was. Also he sent and furnished the country with all kinds of craftsmen such as Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Dutchmen, which ever was the first of their profession that could be had." He went even so far in his desire to develop the natural wealth of his kingdom that he brought over certain German wise men to see if gold could be found in the mines, of which there has always been a tradition, as probably in most countries.
All these pacific enterprises occupied James"s time and helped on the prosperity of the country. But evil times were close at hand.