CHAPTER VIII.
THE REGENCY OF ARRAN.
Yet if the gods demand her, let her sail,—
Our cares are only for the public weal:
Let me be deem'd the hateful cause of all,
And suffer, rather than my people fall.
The prize, the beauteous prize, I will resign,
So dearly valued, and so justly mine.
Iliad, i.
It has already been stated that the Regent of Scotland at this time was James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, better known amid the civil wars and woes of future years as the Duke of Chatelherault, a fief in Poitou, and formerly capital of the duchy of Chatelheraudois. His father was the first who obtained the earldom of Arran, and his mother was Janet Beaton, of Creich, niece of the unfortunate cardinal who was slain in the Castle of St. Andrew's. The French dukedom he received for the spirit with which he maintained Scottish and French interests against the valour of England and the machinations of that degraded and anti-national party the Scottish peers of King Henry's faction, a few of whom have already been introduced to the reader in the preceding chapter.
The little queen was a child in her fifth year; and Henry VIII., that wily and ferocious monarch, during his latter days left nothing untried, by subtle diplomacy, by open war, by hired assassins, and by bands of foreign condottieri leagued with his own troops, to remove from his path all obstruction to a marriage between his son Edward and the young queen of Scotland. He proposed to Arran, if he would deliver her person into his blood-imbrued hands, to assist him with all the power of England and Ireland to make for himself a new kingdom beyond the Forth, and to give his daughter Elizabeth, the future queen of England, in marriage to Arran's heir, the young Lord James Hamilton, then captain of the Scottish Archers in France; but the Regent knew how little Henry's boasts would avail him at the foot of the Grampians, or had patriotism enough to reject a proposal so wild and so disastrous with the disdain it merited; and so, in time, the English Bluebeard was gathered to his wives and to his fathers, bequeathing to the Duke of Somerset, Protector of England during the minority of Edward VI., the pleasant task of arranging, by fair means or foul, a matrimonial alliance between that prince and the little queen of "the rugged land of spearmen."
Cardinal Beaton, long a faithful and a formidable enemy to Scottish treason and to English guile, had perished by the hands of assassins, whose secret projects were better understood at Windsor than at Holyrood. The invasion of Scotland, and the almost total destruction of Edinburgh—the burnings and the devastations in the fertile Lothians by Lord Hertford's army, with the rout of the English at the bloody battle of Ancrum—ended for a time all hope of Somerset ever accomplishing the perilous work so rashly bequeathed to him by his grasping and imperious master; yet, being a brave and high-spirited noble, he still continued the attempt in secret, as he could never despair of having the nation ultimately betrayed while that faithless class, its nobility, existed.
The Scottish peers were now, as usual, divided into two factions, one who adhered to the old treaty with France, and the other—the basest, most venal, and corrupt—composed of those who urged the advantages of the matrimonial alliance between the infant Queen Mary and the boy King Edward. These men, though bearing names of old historic memory, the
"Seed of those who scorn'd
To stoop the neck to wide imperial Rome,"
were mean enough to receive in secret sums of money, first from Henry of England, secondly from the Protector Somerset, and by written obligations to bind themselves to further the selfish and aggressive schemes of both; while, in the same spirit of political perfidy, they gave to the Scottish Regent Arran the most solemn assurances of their entire concurrence with him, in his conservative measures for obeying the will of the late King James V.—whose noble heart they broke,—and in defending the realm of his daughter against all foreign enemies, more especially their ancient foemen of the south. On one hand they openly announced their resolution to support the Church of their fathers, and the faith that came from Rome; on the other, they secretly leagued with those who slew the primate of Scotland in his archiepiscopal castle at St. Andrews, and plotted for the plunder of the temporalities.
The noble Earl of Huntly, with Arran and the more patriotic—the unblemished and unbribed,—looked towards France for a husband for their queen, and for troops to enable them to resist the combined strength of Cassilis, Glencairn, Kilmaurs, and more than two hundred titled Scottish traitors, when backed by the military power of England, and those Spanish and German mercenaries under Don Pedro de Gamboa and Conrad Baron of Wolfenstein, whom the Protector maintained in Norham, Carlisle, and other strongholds near the border.
The weakness of Arran's government, the feeble power of the newly-instituted courts of law, the licentious lives of a hierarchy whose Church and power were nodding to their fall, the gradual declension of an ancient faith, and the dawn of a new one divested of all that was striking or attractive to the imagination, and which, from its grim novelty, the people neither loved nor respected at heart,—all tended to arrest the rapid progress which Scotland had made in art and science, music and poetry, architecture, literature, printing, and commerce, under the fatherly care of the six last kings of the Stuart race. Hence there was generated, about the epoch of our story, a greater barbarism among the feudal aristocracy and their military followers, all of whom were ever but too fierce, turbulent, and prone to bloodshed. Thus outrages, feuds, raids, and combats, the siege and storm of castles and towers, were mere matters of every-day life; and a fight of a few hundred men-at-arms a side, with lance and buckler, sword and arquebuse, in the streets of Edinburgh, Perth, or Aberdeen, occasioned less excitement among their warlike citizens than an election row, a casual fire, or a runaway horse, in these our jogtrot days of peace societies and Sabbatarian twaddle.