CHAPTER XXIV.
MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS.
O king! in an evil day was I beloved by you,
Since that, love has cost me dear!
Amadis de Gaul.
It was in the month of June, and in the meridian of one of June's most beautiful days. The sun shone joyously on old Linlithgow's wooded loch and magnificent palace; on its carved towers, the clustered gables of its grand façade; and on the belfry of St. Michael, the friend of strangers; on the venerable oaks and graceful ashes that fringed its azure lake, where the snow-white swans were floating in crystal and light; on the steep and narrow streets of the town, with their high-peaked roofs and crow-stepped gables, encrusted with coats-of-arms and quaint devices—on all its varied scenery, fell the bright radiance of a cloudless noon.
The sky was of the purest blue, and the lake gleamed like a vast mirror of polished crystal, reflecting in its depths the banks of emerald green, the beautiful palace, with all its mullioned windows and long perspective of crenelated battlements, the summer woodlands, and the floating swans.
Though the poverty and gloom that spread over Scotland with the Reformation, had dimmed the splendour of her court, and depressed the spirit of her people, turning their gaiety into stolid gravity and moroseness, the palace then bore an aspect very different from that it bears to-day.
In many a hall and chamber, where now the long reedy grass, the tenacious ivy, the scented wallflower, and the wild docken, flourish in luxuriance, the well-brushed tapestries of silk and cloth of gold hung on tenterhooks of polished steel; and casements of stained glass, rich with the armorial bearings of Bourbon, Lorraine, Guise, England, and other alliances of the house of Stuart, filled up those mullioned windows, where now the owl and the ravenous gled build their nests; for now the velvet moss and the long grass, are growing green on the floors of Queen Margaret's crumbling bower, and Mary's roofless birthplace—in the stately hall where Scotland's peers, in parliament assembled, gave laws to her lawless clans; and the beautiful chapel, where, for many an age, the most solemn sacraments of the first church were dispensed to her gallant rulers.
In the June of the year of God 1567, its aspect was the same as when King James, of gallant memory, had left it for Flodden field.
The leaves were as green and the grass as verdant, the lake was as blue and the sun as bright, as they are to-day, and may be a thousand years after the last stone of Linlithgow shall have fallen from its place.
Its casements were glittering in the sunshine; the royal standard of Scotland, the yellow banner with the lion gules, was waving from one of the great towers; steel was flashing on parapet and tourelle, as the polished basinets and pikeheads of the soldiers of the guard appeared at intervals on the stone bartisans, from which a number of those little brass cannon known as drakes and moyennes peeped between the massive embrasures. And in that deep archway, which is guarded by two strong octagon towers, perforated with numerous arrow-holes, and surmounted by a gorgeous battlement, representing in four carved compartments the orders of knighthood borne by James V.—the Saint Andrew, Saint George, Saint Michael, and the Golden Fleece—were crowding a group of liverymen and swashbucklers in half-armour, with sword, target, and dagger, their arrogance and pride of clanship being displayed by their bearing and ferocity of aspect, their cocked bonnets, and embroidered sleeve-badges. Mingling with them were gaily attired pages, grooms, falconers, and archers of the queen's body guard, clad in green gaberdines with gorgets and caps of steel, each bearing his unstrung bow, and having a sheaf of arrows bristling in the same belt that sustained his short cross-hilted sword and long double-edged dagger.