David the Second, only son of Robert Bruce, died childless; his sister, Marjory, married Walter, the Lord High Steward of the realm; their son was crowned Robert the Third, King of Scotland. The family took the name of Stewart, which gave by direct descent the Stuart line to the throne of Britain, and their descendants are to-day upon the thrones of England, Italy and Greece. The little skiff, tossed ashore upon the rugged cliffs and cold hospitality of Lorne Castle, as described in our last article, carried therefore the ancestor of a long historic line—a line not always fortunate, not always honest, but presenting for the most part during its record of five hundred years a fair average of manhood and womanhood as kings and queens generally run.
Robert the Third found his country torn by civil feuds, and his temper was too mild for those stormy times. His brother, the Duke of Albany, a crafty counselor of the Iago type, provoked strife between father and son. The good king’s heart was broken. “Vengeance followed,” says Scott, “though with a slow pace, the treachery and cruelty of his brother. Robert of Albany’s own grey hairs went, indeed, in peace to the grave, and he transferred the regency, which he had so foully acquired, to his son Murdoch. But nineteen years after the death of the old king, James the First returned to Scotland, and Duke Murdoch of Albany, with his sons, was brought to the scaffold, in expiation of his father’s guilt and his own.”
Such are the main historic features of the story. The inwoven incidents make us acquainted with many of the customs of humble life which pertain to the close of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century. It portrays the ancient observances of St. Valentine’s Day; the fierce conflict of two Highland clans; the bitter jealousy between the Black Douglas and the Earl of March; the trial by Bier-Right in the Church of St. John; the government of Scottish towns and burroughs; the hardihood of the brave burghers who knew their rights, and had the courage to maintain them. It reveals the dissipation of the Court, led on by the much-loved but dissipated son of the king, the Duke of Rothsay, over whom the father mourned, even as David over his son Absalom.
Through this black serge-cloth of history runs a silver thread—the life of Catharine Glover. Her bold and resolute lover, Henry Gow, a smith and armorer by trade, who had the good fortune of being her Valentine, seems too warlike for her gentle and amiable character, or as Harry sums it up briefly in a blunt sentence: “She thinks the whole world is one great minster church, and that all who live in it should behave as if they were at an eternal mass.”
The romance abounds with many eloquent passages and poetic touches; even the bold armorer, with his love for hard blows, reveals here and there a touch of sentiment, as where he returns to Perth from a long journey and says: “When I crossed the Wicks and saw the bonny city lie fairly before me, like a fairy queen in romance, whom the knight finds asleep among a wilderness of flowers, I felt even as a bird, when it folds its weary wings to stoop down on its own nest.”
The description of the burial of the Highland Chief is the sketch of a master. We are transported to the rugged hills of the northern Highlands. Around us rise lofty mountain peaks; below us stretches the silver expanse of Loch Tay; the black-bannered flotilla carrying the dead leader, Mac Ian, with oars moving to wild music, holds its course to the ruined cathedral of the Holy Isle, where still slumbers the daughter of Henry the First of England, wife of Alexander the First of Scotland. “The monks issue from their lowly portal; the bells peal their death-toll over the long lake; a yell bursts from the assembled multitude, in which the deep shout of warriors, and the shrill wail of females join their notes with the tremulous voice of age, and the babbling cry of childhood; the deer start from their glens for miles around and seek the distant recesses of the mountains, even the domestic animals, accustomed to the voice of man, flee from their pastures into morasses and dingles.”
Scott’s power as a poet is seen in passages like this, and his power as a dramatist in words like the following placed in the mouth of the heart-broken king, revealing in one condensed sentence of agony the unfortunate state of his country: “Oh, Scotland, Scotland; if the best blood of thy bravest children could enrich the barren soil, what land on earth would excel thee in fertility? When is it that a white hair is seen on the beard of a Scottish man, unless he be some wretch like thy sovereign, protected from murder by impotence, to witness the scenes of slaughter to which he can not put a period? The demon of strife and slaughter hath possessed the whole land.”
But the clouds and mists upon the mountain-heights of royalty do not always envelop the valley, or affect the happiness of those who live in humble spheres; and we are glad to know that Harry Gow is at last made happy by the hand of Catharine. He promises to hand up his broadsword, never more to draw it unless against the enemies of Scotland. “And should Scotland call for it,” said Catharine, “I will buckle it round you.”
Our next novel, in historic sequence, takes us to the Court of Louis the Eleventh in the year 1468. The reader is introduced to a young Scotchman by the name of Quentin Durward. He is in France seeking employment for his sword; he joins the Scottish archers which form the body-guard of the King; he soon wins the notice and favor of Louis the Eleventh by his courage, address and honesty; he goes as escort for two noble ladies who had fled for refuge from the court of Burgundy to France, and becomes at last as the title of the book would indicate the important personage in the romance, and his honesty is rewarded by the hand of the heroine.
But the great value of this work is the character sketch of Louis the Eleventh, a king who possessed a soul as hardened as that of Mephistopheles, and a brain like that of Machiavelli, whose birth at Florence in 1469 appropriately commemorates the early years of Louis’ reign; he found the throne in a tottering condition; in fact all Europe was unsettled. It was the dark hour preceding the dawn of the Reformation. There was some excuse for caution, and perhaps for craftiness in order to preserve his government, but no excuse and no necessity for the cruelty and treachery that marked every day of his life. He seemed malevolent for the sake of malevolence; or as Scott more briefly puts it, “he seemed an incarnation of the devil himself, permitted to do his utmost to corrupt our ideas of honor to its very source.” He surrounded himself with menials, invited low and obscure men to secret councils, employed his barber as prime minister, not for any special ability displayed, but from his readiness to pander to his lowest wishes. In every way he brought disrespect upon the court of his father, “who tore from the fangs of the English lion the more than half-conquered kingdom of France.”