“‘For Stirling’s tower
Of yore the name of Snowdoun claims,
And Normans call me James Fitz-James.’”
The scene of the sixth canto is laid in Stirling Castle, while in the earlier parts of the poem the shadow of the fortress is made, as it were, to fall across the country of Clan Alpine. The Highlanders of the Lennox and Menteith could never quite forget the royal stronghold on the Forth. Its far-away outline was a warning and a check even to the restless Macgregors. Had the clans been able to join their forces they might have ventured to defy the castle; but feuds amongst themselves prevented combined action. A league such as Scott makes Roderick Dhu propose between his clan and the Douglases must sometimes have been thought of by actual Highland chiefs, and no doubt several kings half expected to be surrounded at times by Highlanders at Stirling:
“‘To Douglas, leagued with Roderick Dhu,
Will friends and allies flock enow;
Like cause of doubt, distrust, and grief,
Will bind us to each Western Chief.
When the loud pipes my bridal tell,
The Links of Forth shall hear the knell,
The guards shall start in Stirling’s porch;
And, when I light the nuptial torch,
A thousand villages in flames
Shall scare the slumbers of King James!’”
Any plans the Highlanders may have made for attacking the sovereign on his lofty rock were never carried out, but, on the other hand, chiefs such as Roderick Dhu were frequently warded in the castle. Scott was not drawing wholly upon his imagination when he imprisoned the head of a clan in the fortress, and when he made the outlawed Douglas appear before James V. in the Royal Park of Stirling. The pathetic story of Archibald of Kilspindie vainly endeavouring to catch a kindly look in the monarch’s eye is elaborated in the poem, though Scott does not intend his Douglas to be identified with the historical character. The poet makes his outlawed hero exclaim as he glances up at the grim fortress “Where stout Earl William was of old”—the fortress that seemed likely to be the scene of his imprisonment and death:
“‘Ye towers! within whose circuit dread
A Douglas by his sovereign bled.’”
But in order that the tale might be brought to a happy conclusion, a reconciliation is made to take place between the King and the man whom he had refused to own as a subject. Neither Scott nor Theodor Fontane, in his German ballad called “Archibald Douglas,” could bear to leave the Kilspindie story as history records it.
Poets of the minor order, such as Hector Macneill, William Sinclair and John Finlay, have written lines on Stirling and the historical events connected with it, but they have not succeeded, as Scott has done, in bringing the castle’s past back to life. Such a great past requires a great poem, and The Lady of the Lake, although dealing with only six days of James V.’s reign, makes clear Stirling’s position as a palace, a fortress and a prison, and shows the significance of its geographical situation—in the Lowlands and yet near the verge of the Highlands. Walter Scott, both an antiquary and a poet, understood better than any other author the history as well as the romance of the “grey bulwark of the North.”