By this epoch the reader must have begun to perceive what a pleasant time a Scottish statesman must have had of it in those old feudal days.
CHAPTER XLII.
KING JAMES II.
Oh, men of Scotland, though you cannot raise
Your long past monarchs from the silent bier;
Their deeds are worthy of your highest praise,
And simple gratitude demands a tear.
Let no base slander on their memory fall,
Nor malice of their little faults complain;
They were such men as, take them all and all,
We ne'er shall look upon their like again!
Written in 1771.
James II. was one of that old race of kings whom the now forgotten bard, above quoted, called upon posterity to remember. At this period of our story he had reached his twenty-first year, but experience had already made him older. The sole blemish to his very handsome countenance was that small red spot which won him the sobriquet of James with the fiery face. He was considerably above the middle height, and was firmly knit in form; his eyebrows were strongly marked, and a dark glossy moustache, curling round his finely cut mouth, mingled with a short peaked beard. His rich brown hair hung, in the profusion of the time, over his ears, in thick masses called "side locks." He was rapid in thought, bold in speech, and prompt in action, fiery and impetuous in temper; resolute and even desperate in avenging a wrong; and of his wild impulsive nature, his most unruly subject, the Earl of Douglas, was, ere long, to have a terrible proof; but yet, like the Moorish knight of Granada, James was said to be,
Like steel amid the din of arms,
Like wax when with the fair.
Some weeks after the outrage which closes the last chapter, on a day when the sun of June, by its golden light and genial heat, was ripening the young corn in many a fertile haugh, and on many a swelling eminence where now the modern city spreads its streets and squares, James was seated in one of the upper chambers of David's Tower, in the Castle of Edinburgh. It was the same in which King David died on the 7th May, eighty years before, and in memory of him there still hung above the fireplace the mail shirt and barrel-shaped helmet which he had worn at the battle of Durham.
The vaulted apartment was gloomy, and through the basket-shaped gratings of the windows which faced the east the rays of the summer sun came slanting in, filling one portion with strong light, and leaving the other involved in dusky shadow.
Clad in a long scarlet dressing-gown, trimmed with miniver, the king was reclining in an armed chair, with his feet on a velvet tabourette. In his hand, bound in painted vellum, and elaborately clasped with silver, was one of those old French metrical romances which had been translated into Scottish for him by Sir Gilbert the Haye, who was chamberlain to Charles VII. of France; but his thoughts ran not upon its lines, nor the fighting giants, cunning dwarfs, wandering knights, and castles of burnished steel which filled its pages; neither was he attending to the mass of yellow parchments and papers which the high treasurer, and Lord Glammis, the master of the household, were arranging for his inspection; nor was he heeding the occasional remarks of his favourite, the Captain of the Guard, who, clad in half armour, lounged in the recess of a window; but the king's face confessed, by the sadness of its expression, that his thoughts were at Stirling, where his beautiful young queen—his golden-haired Mary d'Egmont, of Gueldres—was confined to her chamber, sick and ill and weary, after the premature birth of her first baby, which died two hours after it came into the world, to the great disappointment of the king and nation.
The great battle of Sark had been recently fought on the borders, and there fifty thousand English, led by "the stoute Earl of Northumberland," had been routed by less than thirty thousand Scots, with the loss of Sir John Pennington and Sir Magnus Red Main, two of the most celebrated soldiers of Henry VI.; and now, from the window at which Gray stood in David's Tower, he could see far down below, where several thousand labourers were daily and nightly at work, enclosing the capital by its first walls, with embattled gates upon the south, east, and west; and, for defence on the north, others were converting the old royal gardens in the valley into a sheet of water—the Nor'loch of future times; these protections for the city being among the earliest measures of the young and politic monarch, "in dread of the evil and skaith of oure ennemies of England," as he states in his charter to the citizens, who loved him for his valiant conduct and fatherly care of them.
"I am well nigh sick of hearing so many petty items," said the king, wearily, interrupting Andrew, abbot of Melrose, the lord high treasurer, a tall, pale-visaged, and sharp-eyed man (on whose white head time had long since marked a permanent tonsure), who had been reading over several papers for his information; "yet I suppose I must hear them: say, lord abbot, how stands our privy purse?"