Tradition, according to Hugh Miller, is silent respecting the siege, but relates many details of the battle. The Scottish forces lay in ambuscade in the ravine or hollow which is still, or was until recently, called by Wallace's name, and attacked a large body of English troops on their way to join some of their countrymen, who were encamped on the peninsula of Easter Ross. The English were surprised and panic-struck, and left six hundred dead on the field of battle. The survivors were unacquainted with the country, and were under the impression that there was continuous land between them and their countrymen on the opposite shore. "They were only undeceived," we are told, "when, on climbing the southern Sutor, where it rises behind the town, they saw an arm of the sea more than a mile in width, and skirted by abrupt and dizzy precipices, opening before them. The spot is still pointed out where they made their final stand; and a few shapeless hillocks, that may still be seen among the trees, are said to have been raised above the bodies of those who fell; while the fugitives, for they were soon beaten from this position, were either driven over the neighbouring precipices, or perished amidst the waves of the Firth."[191]
Sir Thomas does not let us off easily. After subjecting our credulity to a severe strain by one kind of statement, he unexpectedly increases the tension by another. Thus he says that an ancestor in the fifteenth century, Thomas Urquhart, had by his wife Helen Abernethie, daughter of Lord Salton, five-and-twenty sons, who grew up to manhood, and eleven daughters, all of whom found husbands. It would only have been kind of him to have reduced these numbers a little. But on one point he has spared us: we are not asked to believe that there were others who died in infancy.
In a postscript Sir Thomas Urquhart explains that he has just given his readers a sketch of the history of his family, but hopes to furnish them with a complete narrative as soon as he obtains his release from his parole, and is at liberty to attend to this and to other matters of greater importance. The thought of the delightful book in store for mankind is so attractive to him that he cannot help dilating upon it. "In the great chronicle of the House of Urquhart," he continues, "the aforesaid Sir Thomas purposeth, by God's assistance, to make mention of the illustrious families from thence descended, which as yet are in esteem in the countries of Germany, Bohemia, Italy, France, Spain, England, Scotland, Ireland, and several other nations of a warmer climate, adjacent to that famous territory of Greece, the lovely mother of this most ancient and honourable stem."[192] He also intends not to omit the name of any family with which at any time the aforesaid house has contracted alliance.
The concluding paragraph is very amusing; for in it our author promises to give proof of the statements he has made, by quoting from the works of respectable chroniclers of past ages, though the degree of certainty which the reader may thereby expect to reach falls short of that given by Holy writ or the works of Euclid. "And finally," he says, "for confirmation of the truth in deriving of his extraction from the Ionian race of the Prince of Achaia, and in the deduction of all the considerable particulars of the whole story, [the author] is resolved to produce testimonies of Arabick, Greek, Latin, and other writers of such authentick approbation, that we may boldly from thence infer consequences of no less infallible verity then [than] any that is not grounded on faith by means of a Divine illumination, as is the story of the Bible, or on reason, by vertue of the unavoidable inference of a necessary concluding demonstration, as that of the Elements of Euclid; which being the greatest evidence that in any narration of that kinde is to be expected, the judicious reader is bid farewel, from whom the Author for the time most humbly takes his leave."[193]
It is needless to say that the scheme of filling out the sketch of the history of the Urquhart family was never carried out, if ever it had been seriously entertained by Sir Thomas; and we are left in ignorance of the names of the Arabic, Greek, Latin, and other authors on whose testimony our belief in the authenticity of the narrative was to have been firmly based. In the absence of this our judgment is left in suspense, unless, indeed, we conclude that, as the genealogy begins and ends with the names of actual persons,[194] the intermediate part is not likely to have been a mere fabrication. If the links are sound in the places where we can test them, it requires no very great exercise of credulity to believe that they are the same throughout.
Matthew Arnold on one occasion laid down the principle, that a book should either "edify the uninstructed," or "inform the instructed." Sir Thomas Urquhart's "ΠΑΝΤΟΧΡΟΝΟΧΑΝΟΝ" certainly justifies its existence according to this standard of judging literature; for if it does not serve to edify the uninstructed, it does inform the instructed, since the information it contains is not to be found in any other quarter.[195]
One's faith in the credibility of his narrative is, however, a little shaken by finding that in the second book of his favourite author, Rabelais, the genealogy of the giant Pantagruel is carried up to a period far beyond the Flood. It may be a mere coincidence, but it is one of those coincidences that make us very thoughtful.[196]
At the time when Sir Thomas Urquhart wrote, Scotland was supposed to have had a dynasty of kings and a connected political history dating far back before the birth of Christ. The impudent fictions of Hector Boece, whose history of Scotland was published in 1526, had been accepted by the public, and were regarded as genuine facts even by such literary personages as Erasmus and Paulus Jovius. Perhaps Sir Thomas thought that a credulity which had endured the considerable strain which Boece had put upon it might be trusted to bear a still greater weight. Indeed, he interwove the story of his family with that which was current as the genuine history of his native land.
According to the mythical history of Scotland, Gathelus, a Grecian prince, having quarrelled with his father Miol, took refuge in Egypt, and married Scota, a daughter of the Pharaoh who perished in the Red Sea. The young people came west and founded Portugal (i.e. Port of Gathelus), and then journeyed north to Scotland, bringing with them, as part of their baggage, the coronation-stone yet to be seen in Westminster Abbey. Their descendant Fergus, "the father of a hundred kings," was the founder of the Scottish monarchy. These shadowy persons appear again, "with the moonlight streaming through them," and play their parts in the genealogy of the Urquharts.
Some have thought that Sir Thomas believed devoutly in the genealogy himself, and was the dupe of his own imagination. One would be sorry to form so low an opinion of his mental endowments. If the book in question were not an elaborate joke, it can only have been intended to impose upon the English people by convincing them of the extraordinary dignity and grandeur of their captive. If this were indeed the case, he must have had an humbler opinion of the intellectual faculties possessed by the average Englishman than even the majority of his fellow-countrymen entertain.