"Ah, no more can gladden me
Sunny shores or dark projections,
Where in emulous reflections
Blend the rival land and sea;
Where alike in charms and powers,
Where the woods and waves are meeting—
Flowers with foam are seen competing—
Sparkling with the snow-white showers."
CALDERON'S Constant Prince.
In the reign of James V. the Castle of Edinburgh was composed of numerous round and square bastel-houses, which, connected by curtain walls, surrounded the summit of the rock, and were built in various ages by successive princes, and presented the various cadences of architecture, from the strong grim peels of Malcolm Ceanmhor to the florid Scoto-French towers of the fourth and fifth Jameses.
The principal of these bastel-houses was named King David's Tower.
It was erected by David II. in 1357, and therein he died on the 7th May, thirteen years after, when planning a new crusade. This keep was of great height and strength, and overhung the cliff, which now looks down on the gardens of Princes-street, two hundred feet below. One of its lofty turrets was struck by lightning during a terrific storm, on All Saints' Day, 1524; the shattered fragments fell into the loch, and the electric fluid set the apartments of the queen-dowager Margaret on fire. On its summit James V. placed thirty pieces of cannon. The larger chamber within it was named the Lords' Hall; another was styled the New Court Kitchen;—but its first apartments were a range of dreary vaults; for the whole edifice was a veritable castle, with its dungeons below and battlements above. On the latter were a flag-staff, and an iron baile to herald foreign invasion to the shores of Fife and Stirling; just similar to one which still remains on Mylnes-mount below the Argyle battery.
In the same vaulted apartment wherein James V. had, six years before, confined John Scott, a miracle-monger, who pretended that the Virgin Mary could maintain him for any length of time without food, Lady Jane Seton had been detained since her condemnation. Though the strength of the tower was great, its walls of stone being ten feet thick, its doors of iron deep and narrow, and having other securities in the shape of high curtain walls, higher rocks, cannon, towers, and portcullises, the Master Porter of the castle (that supernatural guards might not be wanting) had painted on the chamber door a flaming red cross; and thereafter nailed on a horseshoe, a fox's face, with a bunch of rosemary and rowan-tree, all of which, he had no doubt, would do more than stone redoubts and iron doors to keep the witch in and the devil out.
Let us take a view of her as she appeared on the second day after her trial, for it was now the second, and she had but three days to live.
It was evening now, and the kirk and convent bells of the city below were floating upward to her grated window, which was open, for the season was the sultry month of July. The whole apartment was as bare and stony in its aspect as the arch of a bridge, or any of those caverns in which we have seen Lord Ashkirk hiding; for the groined arch, the low massive walls, and the floor, were all composed of squared blocks of freestone, quarried from the rocks in the neighbourhood. Its whole furniture consisted of a chair and table, the latter being composed of mere fir planks; a leather jar of water, and a bed situated within an arched recess, like a pedestalled tomb in some old church; but, being destitute of curtains and bedding, it was a mere paillasse. Everything was inferior to what was used by the king's soldiers.
A witch required little.
All shrunk from her now; even Lady Cranstoun Riddel, who had formerly been so kind, avoided her; while her husband, the governor, having before his eyes the wrath of the king and the cardinal (who was more dreaded than ten kings), also remained aloof. Thus no visitor ever disturbed her sad and solitary reflections, save the under-warder, who came hastily and stealthily to deposit her food—a coarse bannock and water tinged with a little wine—and as hurriedly withdrew, fearing to meet a glance of her eye—-for witches were thought to possess eyes of evil power.
The coarse bannock, the sole food offered her, remained untasted, for it was salt and bitter; the water was her only nourishment, for assuredly it contained but little wine; as the warder, who prepared it, drank the greater part; for a sorceress, who was to be burned in three days, might do very well, he thought, without wine.